ABSTRACT
As stated in the Introduction, PRINCE2 can be applied to any kind or size of project, i.e. the basic philosophy is always the same. The method should be tailored to suit the size, importance and environment of the project. PRINCE2’s common sense philosophy says, ‘Do not use a sledgehammer to crack a walnut’, but equally do not agree important things informally where there is any chance of a disagreement later over what was agreed. A company may be reading about the PRINCE2 method and saying to itself, ‘But we only have short, simple projects. How can we justify using everything in this method?’ The answer is to tailor the method. The 2009 manual uses two terms, embedding and tailoring, that we should understand and then move on. ‘Embedding’ refers to the adoption of PRINCE2 across an organization. A company may already have in place an effective change control mechanism, tools and procedures and therefore may wish to use these instead of the change control part of PRINCE2. It may have its own configuration management tools and department. It may have a specific way of creating a Business Case. PRINCE2 should be modified to use these documents and procedures as part of this embedding. I have written several ‘project management handbooks’ for organizations, where they have modified terminology, combined processes and inserted their own documents, etc. Every project in the organization then used this embedded variation of PRINCE2. Tailoring is done by a project management team to adapt the method to the context of a specific project.
