At the London Scrum Gathering, in the OpenSpace, I started a discussion about Scrum and Prince2. This post is the results of that discussion.
Credits to Julian Harris and Nigel Baker who did a lot of the talking.Ways to use Scrum and Prince2 together:
1. Royalty-free (i.e. no Prince)
Fairly self explanatory - don't use Prince2 at all. Using Scrum only, completely unimpeded by artefacts of Prince2, is the most efficient way of operating.
2. Barnacle / Anchor
Use Scrum but still use some of the "stabilisers" from Prince2 such as Risk Log, Issue Log, Highlight Reports. Helpful for organisations that are still new to Scrum and want some additional assurance. Using the stabilisers still comes at a cost though and these should be included as Sprint Backlog items to illustrate to the Product Owner how much effort they are costing.
3. Work Packet/Package
Scrum is only used for the delivery of a work package (i.e. a Prince2 work package). The work package may equate to one or many sprints, but Scrum is just used to execute the work package, the rest of the project management is done in the Prince2 method. It is also known as an "incremental death march", i.e. all your really doing is breaking up the different phases of the project into "increments", including an increment for design, but essentially still a detailed plan leading to a precise date that is likely to be inaccurate (more on precision and accuracy later).
4. Interface to Prince2
You are using Scrum internally but to outside organisations/departments you are providing a Prince2 wrapper, facade or interface. All an outside organisation will see is the Prince2 wrapper you are providing. Some people also call this "stealth mode" and it is a way that some organisations adopt Scrum from the bottom up (i.e. without management knowing about it).
The main difference between 3. and 4. is that 4. is actually using Scrum, with a bunch of other things that you have to do as well, whereas 3. is not even remotely Scrum. Methods 2. and 4. are similar, but method 2. uses much less of Prince2 than 4. Ideally as you mature as an agile team/organisation you will progress from 3./4. to 2. to 1.
Accuracy vs precision in project management
For a detailed explanation of accuracy vs precision there is a good write up of the target analogy on wikipedia. It relates to project management in that more controlled approaches, in particular gantt charts, are precise but most times quite inaccurate. Scrum on the other hand is more accurate since it is based on evidence (burn down) and history tends to repeat itself. So if it took a team 2 weeks to do 50 units of work, it will likely also take them another 2 weeks to do another 50 units of work.
Is there a place for Prince2?
Yes. Most definitely. Prince2 works quite well in controlled environments - well defined, lower complexity work. After all, the word PRINCE comes from PRojects IN Controlled Environments. For example moving an office from one building to another. Prince2 can scale down quite easily as well and is good for smaller teams or shorter time scales. If however there is a high level of complexity or an uncontrollable environment then you need a project management strategy that can cope with the complexity. Usually software development contains an amount of creativity in documenting the requirements and another amount for converting these requirements into working software. With 2 amounts of creativity and interpretation there is a huge amount of complexity - "I didn't mean it to do it like that, but rather this way instead".
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