Over the last week, I’ve completed my PRINCE2 Practitioner course with a view to understanding more best-practice techniques when managing projects. PRINCE2 is a methodology widely used within public and private sector here in the UK in particular, and takes a particularly procedural view of how to run a project. Methods and controls are often quite strict (though very tailorable) to encourage project managers not to cut corners and let a project get away from them. In short, PRINCE is the language of business and management, and is hard to escape when working on IT projects within a medium to large sized company.

The Agile methodology attacks the problem from a different angle, from a grass-routes perspective that has become popular with many software houses in the last decade. Implementations such as XP, SCRUM, DSDM etc are becoming more popular in the workplace (and rightly so).

Recently I was asked how I could reconcile my understanding of PRINCE with the Agile methodology. For me, I think there is a place that PRINCE2 and Agile come together, with Agile dealing with some lower-level day-to-day operation that PRINCE leaves out. There is an article I have found at TCC about using both PRINCE2 and DSDM Atern which I found quite illuminating and would suggest others read.