Planning a PRINCE2 Project In A Day For Dummies: (In A Day For Dummies)

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1 What You Can Do In A Day 2 Foolish Assumptions 2 Icons Used in This Book 2 Chapter 1: So What's a Project Method and Why Do I Need to Use One? 5 Getting the Lowdown on PRINCE2 6 Giving You Some Facts about Projects 7 Fact 1: A lot of projects go wrong 7 Fact 2: We know why projects go wrong 8 Fact 3: We know good ways of preventing a lot of those things 10 Fact 4: PRINCE2 is free to use 11 Making Your Life Easier with PRINCE2 11 Clearing Up Some Misunder-standings about PRINCE2 13 Chapter 2: Project Initiation and the PID 15 Getting to Grips with Initiating a Project 16 Understanding Why You Need Plans 17 Looking at What's in the PID 19 Getting Strategic 20 Thinking about risk management 20 Thinking about quality management 22 Thinking about Change and Configuration Management 27 Thinking about communications 29 Deciding on Controls 34 Breaking the project into blocks 34 Setting up the other controls 35 Planning Your Project 37 Working on the Business Case 38 Building the full Business Case 38 Planning the measurement of benefits 39 Preparing for the First Delivery Stage 40 Fitting PRINCE2 to the Project 40 Writing the Extra Bits of the PID 40 Putting the PID Together 42 Looking at How You Use the PID 43 Asking the Project Board to commit to the whole project 43 Chapter 3: Planning the Project, and the First Delivery Stage 47 Thinking about the Planning 48 Considering organisational requirements 49 Thinking about money 49 Planning with Products 50 Looking at the planning problem 51 Focusing first on what you must produce 51 Identifying products in the project 52 Using the Product Flow Diagram 54 Writing Product Descriptions 57 Defining the project 62 Giving the product list some structure 62 Moving On to Activity Planning 66 Estimating - the Easy Bit 67 Scheduling and Resourcing 68 Activity networking and precedence networks 69 Activities with Gantt charts 74 Activities and resource levelling 74 Checking Risk 75 Explaining the Plan 77 Adding explanations for those who read the plan 77 Financial planning 78 Planning at Three Levels 78 The Project Plan 78 The Stage Plan 79 Chapter 4: Where to Go from Here 81 Finding out about training 81 Visiting dummies.com 82

About the Author :
Nick Graham is a director of the consultancy and training company he founded, Inspirandum Ltd, and is a member of the Association for Project Management and of the Institute of Directors. He holds professional qualifications in systems analysis and design, project management and risk management, and has particular expertise in the PRINCE2 project management method.