I have the pleasure of working together with some of the coolest people in the world of software development. My colleagues, or most of them, share their knowledge to others on the web, and one of them is Martin van Borselaer. Martin knows projects. That’s it. And he shares his vision on how to develop software and how we best can manage our projects in a Lean and Agile approach. Of course, Prince2 is king (or do I need to say prince?) in project management, especially when it comes to software development projects. The counterpart is that Prince2 has the bad name of being too big. Too much overhead creates an enormous project, even if the idea was to have an Agile approach to the project itself. In the field, Martin has shown us that Prince2 has a lot of good stuff in it that we can use in order to manage a concrete Agile IT project. But how? Martin has a Lean vision, a thought on how to implement good project management even in situation we need to eliminate waste in. He explains that the wrong thing to do is to go PINO (Prince2 in Name Only) but to understand the elimination of waste in every process, and apply that to the Prince2 principles. When I took the Prince2 foundation exam, there were some questions about which document comes when, but do we really need this? Not if we work on an Agile way in a Prince2 environment.
In his new Whitebook (sorry guy’s, Dutch only) Martin van Borselaer explains that in the new Prince2 handbook (the old one was from 2005, so this version is called Prince2 2009) there’s more room for an Agile approach to Prince2 and project management. Prince2 2009 explains to us how we can do better by “not living by the book”. Prince2, the 2009 approach, gives us some insights in the way we can do real live projects. Martin, you were right.
