Passing the PRINCE2 Exams For Dummies

Revising the Managing a Stage Boundary Process

There are two product-related areas of work for the Project Manager in the process. The first is producing new management products, notably the Stage Plan for the next stage. The second area is to update ongoing project documentation such as the Project Plan and the Project Approach.

As you revise the process, watch out for poorly named activities. The most misleading is the activity ‘Update the Project Plan’, which actually covers much more than updating the Project Plan. It involves checking the Project Initiation Documentation (PID) and updating anything that needs it, including the strategies. In the list of recommended actions for the activity, the manual gives a few examples of changes that may be needed, but be aware that the changes can go wider than the examples given. [Manual 17.4.1]

Those who already know PRINCE2 appreciate the need to update the PID on the stage boundary anyway, so in practice it doesn’t cause too much of a problem. The manual is very much harder to follow if you’re learning PRINCE2 and you find the text hard to follow or find that it assumes prior knowledge. If you get confused, try PRINCE2 For Dummies, where the style is more relaxed than the official PRINCE2 manual can be and there’s more explanation. [P2FD Ch6, Understanding the Process of ‘Managing a Stage Boundary’]

A second activity with a rather misleading name is ‘Update the Business Case’, which indeed performs that update, but also the related ...