Ensure Continued Business Justification is one of the seven fundamental principles in PRINCE2 7 that guides project management practice. This principle establishes that a valid business reason must exist for starting a project, and this justification must remain valid throughout the entire project lifecycle.

At its core, this principle requires that every PRINCE2 project has a documented Business Case that articulates why the project is being undertaken. The Business Case captures the expected benefits, costs, risks, and timescales associated with the project. It serves as the primary driver for decision-making and provides the rationale for investment.

The principle emphasizes continuous validation rather than a one-time assessment. Project teams must regularly review and verify that the business justification remains sound at key decision points, particularly at stage boundaries. If circumstances change and the project can no longer be justified, the project should be stopped rather than continuing to consume resources on an endeavor that will not deliver adequate value.

This principle connects closely to organizational strategy and ensures alignment between project activities and business objectives. The Project Board holds responsibility for confirming the Business Case remains viable, while the Executive owns the Business Case and champions its delivery.

Key aspects include defining clear success criteria, identifying measurable benefits, understanding who will realize those benefits, and establishing how benefits will be measured post-project. The Business Case evolves as more information becomes available, becoming increasingly detailed and refined as the project progresses.

By applying this principle, organizations protect themselves from investing in projects that no longer make business sense. It promotes accountability, supports informed decision-making, and ensures resources are directed toward initiatives that genuinely contribute to organizational goals and deliver real value to stakeholders.

Learn from Experience is one of the seven fundamental principles in PRINCE2 7 that guides how projects should be managed effectively. This principle emphasizes that project teams must actively seek, record, and apply lessons throughout the entire project lifecycle to improve performance and avoid repeating past mistakes.

The principle operates across three distinct timeframes. First, when starting a project, teams should look for lessons from previous similar projects within the organization or from external sources. This helps identify potential risks, effective practices, and pitfalls to avoid. Second, during the project execution, teams should continuously capture lessons as they emerge from day-to-day activities. This real-time learning allows for adjustments and improvements while the project is still in progress. Third, as the project closes, teams must document and share lessons learned so future projects can benefit from the accumulated knowledge.

Implementing this principle requires creating a culture where team members feel comfortable sharing both successes and failures. Organizations should establish mechanisms for storing and retrieving lessons, making them accessible to future project teams. The Project Manager plays a crucial role in fostering this learning environment and ensuring lessons are actively sought and applied.

The benefits of applying this principle include reduced risk of repeating costly errors, improved efficiency through proven practices, better decision-making based on historical evidence, and continuous organizational improvement. It transforms individual project experiences into organizational knowledge assets.

Practically, this means maintaining a lessons log throughout the project, conducting regular reviews to identify what is working well and what needs improvement, and ensuring handover documentation includes valuable insights for operational teams. By embedding learning into standard project practices, organizations build capability and maturity in project delivery over time.

Define Roles, Responsibilities and Relationships is one of the seven PRINCE2 principles that ensures clarity in project governance and accountability. This principle establishes that every project must have clearly defined and agreed roles and responsibilities for the people involved in the project, as well as a means of achieving effective communication between all stakeholders.

In PRINCE2 7, this principle recognises that projects bring together people from different business functions, organisations, and sometimes external suppliers. For the project to succeed, everyone needs to understand what is expected of them and how they relate to others involved in the project.

The principle addresses three primary stakeholder interests that must be represented in the project management structure: Business (ensuring the project delivers value and remains viable), User (specifying requirements and ensuring the solution meets operational needs), and Supplier (providing resources and expertise to create the project outputs).

PRINCE2 defines specific roles within its project management team structure, including the Project Board (comprising Executive, Senior User, and Senior Supplier), Project Manager, Team Manager, and Project Assurance. Each role has distinct responsibilities that contribute to effective project delivery.

Relationships between roles must be clearly established to facilitate decision-making, escalation paths, and communication flows. This includes understanding reporting lines, authority levels, and how different parties interact throughout the project lifecycle.

The principle also emphasises that roles may be shared or combined depending on the project size and complexity, but the responsibilities associated with each role must still be fulfilled. Effective application of this principle helps prevent confusion, reduces conflict, ensures accountability, and enables efficient project governance. Projects that fail to establish clear roles often experience delays, misunderstandings, and poor decision-making due to ambiguity about who is responsible for what.

Manage by Stages is one of the seven fundamental principles in PRINCE2 7 that ensures projects are planned, monitored, and controlled on a stage-by-stage basis. This principle recognizes that planning an entire project in detail from the outset is often impractical and risky, as uncertainty increases the further you look into the future.

Under this principle, a PRINCE2 project is divided into at least two management stages: an initiation stage and at least one further management stage. Each stage represents a distinct section of the project with defined boundaries, allowing the Project Board to maintain control through regular decision points called stage gates.

At the end of each management stage, the Project Board reviews progress, assesses the Business Case viability, and decides whether to authorize the next stage. This approach provides natural breakpoints where senior management can evaluate whether continuing the project remains justified and worthwhile.

The benefits of managing by stages include enhanced control, as detailed planning only extends to the current stage while subsequent stages have outline plans. This enables more accurate planning because near-term activities can be estimated with greater precision. It also allows for regular review points where lessons learned can be incorporated and plans adjusted based on actual performance.

The number and length of stages should be determined based on factors such as project complexity, risk levels, organizational requirements, and how far ahead it is sensible to plan in detail. High-risk projects may benefit from shorter stages with more frequent checkpoints, while lower-risk endeavors might have fewer, longer stages.

This principle supports effective governance by ensuring that commitment of resources and funds occurs incrementally rather than all at once, reducing exposure to risk and enabling better decision-making throughout the project lifecycle.

Manage by Exception is one of the seven fundamental principles in PRINCE2 7 that establishes a governance framework enabling efficient decision-making and resource allocation throughout a project. This principle creates clear boundaries of delegated authority through the use of tolerances, which define the permissible deviation from planned targets for aspects such as time, cost, scope, quality, risk, and benefits.

The core concept involves setting tolerance levels at each management layer within the project. When work proceeds within these agreed tolerances, the responsible manager has autonomy to make decisions and manage day-to-day activities. However, when a forecast indicates that tolerances will be exceeded, this triggers an exception, requiring the matter to be escalated to the next higher authority level for guidance.

This approach offers several key advantages. First, it promotes efficient use of senior management time by freeing higher-level managers from routine decisions, allowing them to focus on strategic matters while being assured that significant issues will be brought to their attention. Second, it provides clear accountability at each level, as managers understand their decision-making boundaries. Third, it enables faster decision-making at appropriate levels, preventing bottlenecks that would occur if every decision required senior approval.

In practice, the Project Board sets tolerances for the Project Manager at the stage level. The Project Manager then delegates work to Team Managers with their own tolerances for work packages. If any manager forecasts breaching their tolerances, they must raise an exception report to their superior, who then decides on the appropriate course of action.

This principle requires that tolerances are clearly defined and communicated at the start of each stage or work package. It creates a management by exception culture where escalation occurs only when genuinely needed, making project governance both effective and efficient.

Focus on Products is one of the seven fundamental principles in PRINCE2 7 that guides project management practice. This principle emphasizes that successful projects are output-oriented, meaning they concentrate on defining, delivering, and quality-checking the products or deliverables that the project must produce.

At its core, this principle recognizes that projects exist to create specific outputs that enable desired outcomes and benefits. Rather than being activity-focused, PRINCE2 encourages teams to clearly identify what needs to be produced before determining how to produce it. This approach ensures that all project work is purposeful and contributes to tangible results.

The principle operates through Product Descriptions, which define each product's purpose, composition, quality criteria, and quality methods. These descriptions create a shared understanding among stakeholders about what will be delivered and the standards it must meet. This clarity reduces misunderstandings and scope creep while providing a solid foundation for planning and progress monitoring.

Product-based planning is the practical application of this principle. Teams create a Product Breakdown Structure that hierarchically decomposes the final deliverable into its component products. This visual representation helps identify all required products and their interdependencies, making it easier to estimate effort, allocate resources, and sequence work effectively.

The Focus on Products principle also strengthens quality management. By defining quality criteria upfront, teams can verify whether products meet requirements through quality reviews and testing. This prevents the delivery of substandard outputs that fail to satisfy stakeholder expectations.

Furthermore, this principle facilitates better communication with stakeholders, as discussing concrete products is often easier than discussing abstract activities. It also supports more accurate progress tracking, since completion of products provides measurable milestones.

Ultimately, Focus on Products ensures that project effort translates into valuable deliverables that fulfill the project's objectives and contribute to realizing anticipated benefits.

Tailor to Suit the Project is one of the seven fundamental principles in PRINCE2 7 that emphasizes the importance of adapting the methodology to fit the specific needs, complexity, and environment of each unique project. This principle recognizes that no two projects are identical, and therefore a rigid, one-size-fits-all approach would be ineffective and potentially counterproductive.

The principle requires project managers and teams to carefully consider factors such as project size, complexity, importance, capability of the team, and risk levels when determining how PRINCE2 should be applied. A small, straightforward project will require less documentation and fewer formal processes compared to a large, complex initiative with multiple stakeholders and significant financial investment.

Tailoring can occur across several dimensions within PRINCE2. This includes adjusting the management products (documents and records), modifying the frequency and formality of management stages, combining or adapting roles to suit available resources, and scaling the level of control and reporting mechanisms. The goal is to ensure that project controls remain appropriate and add value rather than creating unnecessary bureaucratic overhead.

However, tailoring must be done thoughtfully and with proper justification. It does not mean abandoning PRINCE2 principles or cutting corners. The seven principles themselves should always be applied, as they represent the foundation of effective project management. What changes is how the themes, processes, and practices are implemented to match the project context.

Effective tailoring requires experience and judgment. Project managers must understand both PRINCE2 thoroughly and the specific project environment to make informed decisions about what adaptations are necessary. Documentation of tailoring decisions in the Project Initiation Documentation ensures transparency and allows stakeholders to understand why certain approaches have been modified. This principle ultimately ensures PRINCE2 remains flexible, practical, and applicable across diverse industries and project types.

Tailoring in PRINCE2 7 is a fundamental principle that requires adapting the method to suit the specific context of each project. This ensures PRINCE2 remains practical and applicable across diverse project environments rather than being applied rigidly.

Tailoring Factors are the considerations that influence how PRINCE2 should be adapted. These include:

1. **Project Scale and Complexity**: Larger, more complex projects typically require more detailed processes and controls, while smaller projects can operate with streamlined approaches.

2. **Project Environment**: The organizational culture, existing processes, and working methods influence how PRINCE2 integrates with established practices.

3. **Project Type**: Whether the project involves IT development, construction, organizational change, or other domains affects which aspects need emphasis.

4. **Risk Level**: Higher-risk projects demand more rigorous controls and reporting mechanisms.

5. **Team Experience**: Experienced teams may need less formal guidance compared to teams new to project management.

Documentation tailoring is essential for maintaining efficiency. PRINCE2 specifies various management products (documents) but recognizes that not all projects require the same level of documentation detail. Key considerations include:

- **Combining Documents**: Several management products can be merged into single documents when appropriate for smaller projects.

- **Formality Level**: Documentation can range from formal written records to informal notes or verbal communications, depending on project needs.

- **Content Depth**: The amount of detail captured should be proportionate to the project's complexity and stakeholder requirements.

- **Storage and Format**: Digital tools, templates, or traditional documents can all serve as appropriate formats.

The principle ensures that governance remains appropriate and valuable rather than bureaucratic. Projects must maintain sufficient records to support decision-making and provide audit trails, but excessive documentation that adds no value should be avoided. The Project Board approves the tailoring approach, typically documented in the Project Initiation Documentation.