Many of the delegates who attend my Prince2 courses work in what I describe as a meetings culture where an individual’s success can be measured by the amount of time they spend in progress meetings. One of Prince2’s seven principles is “Manage by Exception”, or as Bert Lance said, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

In a Prince2 project accountability is achieved by delegating authority from one level of management to the next by setting tolerances against the six project objectives that need to be managed; time, cost, scope, benefit, quality and risk.

Tolerance is defined as the acceptable deviation above and below a plan’s target without escalating the deviation to the next level of management. The main tolerances applied are time and cost. Provided the Project Manager stays within tolerance everybody is happy. Only when tolerances are threatened is the situation escalated to primary stakeholders.

This makes better use of management time.