PRINCE2 Agile: Best practice for a VUCA world

Frank Sun – Senior Purchasing Manager

Having responsibility for critical areas in major companies – such as supply chain and purchasing – has taught me a great deal about the importance of business processes and best practice methods.

And this has influenced my learning journey through PeopleCert best practices including PRINCE2 Project Management, PRINCE2 Programme Management and now PRINCE2 Agile.

In supply chain management, not only are the areas of process, performance, people, and practice closely linked – they are fundamental to running a good business. Solely through training do people develop the capability to run effective and efficient processes, and achieve the required results.

Combining best practices in a strategic way increases the chance of achieving high performance and hitting targets. Without this, managing projects can end up being more focused on the process at the expense of truly understanding and meeting the needs of the customer/end user. The risk then is that the customer/user will fail to adopt the product delivered by the project.

However, with the right best practice approaches and a focus on benefits, it’s possible to see users adopt a new system and be able to measure the improvement and value delivered.

Running projects and programmes

The most important factor, when choosing a best practice to adopt for projects and programmes, is how practical the guidance is.

For example, how to define roles and responsibilities, how to work with a sponsor, how to build the strategic links between projects, programmes and portfolios. Perhaps even more important is being able to define what real value means to the customer/user and understand what benefits look like to them.

That’s why I adopted PRINCE2 Project Management to help deliver real project outcomes and PRINCE2 Programme Management to transform project outputs into capabilities that lead to outcomes and onwards to benefits.

Deploying best practice at this level – especially for complicated programmes – creates a transformation flow: building momentum for change while gaining trust and confidence within the organization to attract further funding.

PRINCE2 Agile – for the VUCA age

In the Chinese automotive industry, the normal lifecycle of the internal combustion engine is about seven years. Therefore, the rate of change and development is slower.

However, in today’s electric vehicle industry, the lifecycle can be measured in months, not years. This is the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) age, which gives you an idea of how quickly companies need to innovate to remain competitive.

To innovate at such a pace, organizations must adapt their ways of working which means that design and manufacturing should combine more established project management processes with agile thinking. And I think the latest version of PRINCE2 Agile offers this combination.

However, there are differences in application in the industry I work in. Though it may not be appropriate to use agile methods throughout an entire manufacturing process, they are especially useful in the design phase and through the supply chain, as they help collect valuable information to make better decisions.

Compared to the ICT industry, the profit margins in automotive manufacturing are – I believe – not as great and the product characteristics are different. Therefore, our industry is less likely to support a full-sized agile project for product development. It is better for us to adopt a more traditional product development and project management approach within our main work, while using agile product delivery to meet a custom or short-notice requirement from a customer.

That said, we can use PRINCE2 Agile to create both the process efficiency and control necessary for effective project management and agility at the delivery level to maintain customer satisfaction.

When a company’s ultimate goal is ambiguous, adding agile knowledge and techniques gives professionals the ability to test ideas and options, obtain feedback, and deliver the value a customer expects.

For example, in a supply chain digitalization transformation project, the ultimate goal is process efficiency as well as customer satisfaction.

However, even top management cannot give a clear picture of what the ultimate output will be. Therefore, the project needs to start with progressive elaboration, beginning with multiple rounds of requirement collection and analysis from a supply chain perspective, followed by a proof of concept and iterative development from a systems perspective.

Educating the next generation of Chinese professionals

In addition to my day job as a Senior Purchasing Manager in the automotive industry, I’m also an external professor at Xi’an Jiaotong–Liverpool University (XJTLU), helping the next generation of professionals prepare to join the workforce.

From my own experience, I can guarantee that studying and getting certified in professional best practice already gives them a stepping stone to becoming skilled professionals that can contribute as soon as they enter the workforce.

Developing project management skills, knowledge, and competencies will prepare them for all the challenges of change they will face when starting work. In fact, project management offers them a universal skill for work and even for life away from work.

Methods such as PRINCE2 Project Management and PRINCE2 Agile, as much for the technicalities of managing projects, enable professionals to achieve higher performance in business and become valuable assets to their organization.