The PRINCE2 standard defines a number of roles and their associated responsibilities. This includes the project board, which is one of the defined groups encompassing the following roles:
Executives
An executive acts as a single point of accountability for a project and is responible for designing and apponting the Project Management Team. They develop the business case at the start of the project and is constantly evauluating the value of the project in relation to any invested resources. Executives are generally appointed by either Corporate or Programme Management.
Senior Users
The aim of the Senior User is to bridge the gap between the Users and the Project Management Team, providing valuable communication between the two distinct entities. Additionally, they provide the Project Team with a list of requirements to work towards and implement in their solutions, ensuring that the functionality of the project is in line with the needs of the Users in terms of both ease of use and quality. The responsibilities fulfilled by the Senior Users are comparable to those of a Business Advisor in the DSDM project life-cycle.
Senior Suppliers
The Senior Supplier is responsible for the delivery of any necessary resources required for the continuous progression of the project. The Senior Supplier can either come from the customer organisation or from a supplier. The role involves ensuring that the right tools, knowledge and equipment are available to those who need it during the development of the solution. Suppliers may be subcontracted or otherwise.
One project management technique adopted by the PRINCE2 paradigm is project assurance. It aims to provide an independent view of how the project is progressing from the perspective of the customer and any potential adopters of the produced solution. The aforementioned roles are all responsible for providing assurance in relation to their roles in the project.
- The Executive is responsible for ensuring whether the business aspects of the project are correct and that the project continues to provide good value relative to investment.
- The Senior User is responsible for ensuring that the project stays on track and continues to meet user requirements throughout the project. They also ensure that the end product will be fit for purpose.
- The Senior Supplier is responsible for ensuring that the resources, tools and knowledge required by the whole team will be available throughout the development of the solution. They also evaluate whether the project's time and funding targets are on track to be met or not.
In addition to the Project Board and the individuals assigned to manage project assurance, there must also be a person or group responsible for Change Management. The individuals responsible for this are referred to as Change Authority.
The responsibilities of the Change Authority include approving or disapproving change requests.
As a whole, the project board is responsible for the success or failure of the project. They are responsible for providing any required resources or funds in order for the project to succeed in addition to support, direction and ensuring effective communication between the project team and the stakeholders. The roles fulfilled by the Project Board may be interpreted as those of Project Management when compared to alternative project SDLC implementations.
As PRINCE2 provides a structured approach to project management, defining a method of managing projects within a rigid predefined framework, it is very clear which responsibilities fall into any individual's domain within the project, making it extremely clear as to who is accountable for what.
The abundance of documentation required in order to correctly adhere to the PRINCE2 framework is beneficial in that it provides a degree of clarity throughout the project that no other framework provides, allowing anyone involved with the project to know at any one time exactly what is happening within the project. On the other hand, the sheer quantity of documentation required can potentially be more than necessary, or even completely unrealistic depending on the scale of the project itself.
One disadvantage of PRINCE2 is its lack of accessibility. Due to the sheer scale of the specification, it is difficult, especially for those involved with smaller projects, to appropriately tailor the framework in order for it to work efficiently with their project. This is often an issue because the amount of documentation required to be produced as standard in order to adhere to the specification is often far more than is necessary or appropriate, especially for projects of a smaller size.