PRINCE2 Management Stages
verses Technical Stages
PRINCE2 Stages –
a Short Guide
PRINCE2 Stages
Management verses Technical Stages
PRINCE2 Stages
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by David Geoffrey Litten
Cover and internal design © David Geoffrey Litten
First Edition, July 2013
http://www.prince2primer.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or
mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems – except in the case of
brief quotations in articles or reviews – without the permission in writing from its publisher,
David Geoffrey Litten
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks,
or trade names of their respective holders.
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Management verses Technical Stages
PRINCE2 Stages
Management Stage and a Technical Stage - the differences!
One of the most puzzling aspects of PRINCE2, is the understanding and intelligent use of
management stages, and when running training sessions, it is critically important to explain the
difference between management and technical stages.
Consider a typical project for a moment. In your first high-level planning session as part of your
project plan, you and your team will think through the technical or specialist work that needs to
be carried out. This is often done under headings such as specification, design and
development, build, test and install.
Each of these should be seen as a technical stage.
But before we go any further, I want to introduce the concept of PRINCE2 management
stages. The Project board provides resource authority to the project manager to manage only
one stage at a time, and at the end of each stage the project manager must report back to the
project board and seek permission to move on to the next stage.
Unlike technical stages, management stages do not overlap, and can therefore only occur one
stage at a time. In order to do this, the project manager creates a high-level project plan
splitting the project into sensible management stages. The Project Board will need to agree and
authorize the project plan as part of exiting the Initiation stage and proceeding to the first/only
delivery stage.
As the end of each management stage is reached, the project manager creates a detailed plan
of the next stage, and presents this to the project board along with other information to seek
permission to proceed.
A PRINCE2 project has as a minimum, just two management stages; the initiation stage (where
the project initiation documentation containing in the project plan will be created), and a
second and final delivery stage. For most projects however, there will be a need for more than
one delivery stage.
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Management verses Technical Stages
PRINCE2 Stages
The following diagram demonstrates that principle:
As you can see, management stages are defined as “partitions of the project with management
decision points, and equate to the commitment of resources and authority to spend”
What this means is that the project board releases resources and budget to the project
manager on a management stage-by-management stage basis.
A management stage - how many should a project have?
How far ahead in the project is it sensible to plan? This might be as simple as answering the
question, “can we plan the development in detail, until he had agreed on the specification?”
Where are the key decision points going to be? This will give the first clues as to how many
stages, and where in time should they begin and end.
How risky is the project?. High risk projects will tend to have shorter duration of management
stages to allow more control by the project board. This will result however, in the project
manager reporting back to the project board on a more frequent basis.
How confident is the project management team about the project?” Low confidence will tend
to cause the need for shorter and more frequent management stages.
Is the project part of a larger initiative such as a programme? If so, it may best to align
management stages with key milestone points contained within such a programme.
It may be that management stages are set to align with key deliverables handed over to the
customer at various time points within a project.
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Management verses Technical Stages
PRINCE2 Stages
So how are technical stages aligned with management stages?
Technical stages are in reality a group of activities being carried out by one or more people with
the same type of skills. Such technical stages may traverse more than one management stage.
Technical stages are therefore typified by the use of a particular set of specialist skills.
So check out the following diagram showing a set of technical stages traversing the whole of
the project:
So how exactly do we overlay technical stages within the management stages?
And what happens when a particular technical stage needs to traverse more than one
management stage?
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Management verses Technical Stages
PRINCE2 Stages
The answers are to consider the following points:
The mind-set here is to think “whole products” when splitting a technical stage across more
than one management stage.
When asking a member of the team how much percentage complete are we, you will only get a
subjective answer, but asking which products have been completed will remove the ambiguity.
So you will get very effective progress control by aligning specialist product completion with
stage boundaries.
This will give the Project Board unambiguous progress data upon which to base their decision
to proceed or not.
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Management verses Technical Stages
PRINCE2 Stages
So where technical stages traverse a Management Stage boundary, consider splitting the
technical stages (and maybe slightly modifying the Management Stage boundary to coincide
with the completion of a whole or partial specialist product:
CasaBlanca Publishing Corp |© David Geoffrey Litten 2013
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Management verses Technical Stages
PRINCE2 Stages
Finally, let us look at key understanding points regarding management and technical stages:

Management and technical stages do not always stant at the same time

Management stages must not overlap

Technical stages can overlap – and this is often a way to make effective use of specialist
skills and availability. An example. Why would you want to wait until ALL the offices in a
building have been wired and decorated before moving in the desks and furniture to
SOME of them? Another example. Before finishing the technical stage of ‘design’, you
could start on the technical stage of ‘test’ to carry that out on any of the project
modules that have been designed at that point.

You can have more than one of the technical stages traversing each management stage

You can have more than one management stage traversing over one technical stage
(but the management stages do not overlap themselves of course!)
Okay, this article should clear up any confusion between the definition and application of both
management stages and technical stages within a PRINCE2 project!
Need to pass both PRINCE2 exams? Check out my PRINCE2 Primer HERE!
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Management verses Technical Stages
PRINCE2 Stages
About The Author
Dave is an Accredited Project Management Trainer
David spent 25 years as a senior Project Manager for USA multinationals, and has deep
experience in project management. He now develops a wide range of project-related
downloadable video training products under the Primer brand name. In addition, David runs
project management training seminars across the world, and is a prolific writer on the many
topics of project management.
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