9.1 Directing and Managing Roles

9.1 Directing and Managing Roles

Quick summary: The syllabus names eleven PRINCE2 Agile roles. Six sit at the directing and managing levels: project executive, chief product owner, senior supplier, project assurance, project manager, project support. The other five are delivery roles, covered in section 9.2. Expect questions that test the boundary between two adjacent roles.

The eleven roles at a glance

The agile coach and the delivery roles are covered in section 9.2.

Project executive

Accountable for the project as a whole. The executive owns the business case and is accountable for value for money — that the project remains desirable, viable and achievable and delivers a return that justifies the investment.

Specific responsibilities:

• Owns and approves the business case; ensures it is re-tested at each stage boundary
• Chairs the project board and holds the casting decision
• Secures funding and authorizes the project, each stage, and closure
• Sets project-level tolerances and decides on exceptions escalated by the project manager
• Appoints the project manager and the other board roles
• Balances the demands of the business, user and supplier interests

The executive represents the business interest. There is only ever one executive — accountability cannot be shared without becoming nobody's.

Chief product owner

The chief product owner (CPO) is the project-level product ownership role, and it is a Version 2 addition that does not exist in older PRINCE2 Agile material.

The defining responsibility: ensuring that the project backlog and the delivery teams' product backlogs align. Where several teams contribute to one product, each has its own delivery backlog. Without a single role holding project-level ordering, the teams optimize locally and the project loses coherence — five teams each building their own highest-priority item, none of which combine into a releasable increment.

Specific responsibilities:

• Owns and orders the project backlog, expressing requirements at project level
• Ensures delivery teams' product backlogs are aligned with it
• Represents the user and product interest at the directing level, working to the benefit objectives the business case sets out
• Makes cross-team priority decisions and resolves conflicts between teams' competing needs
• Works with the release map so that each release is a coherent, releasable whole

The boundary to hold: the CPO works at project level; the product owner (section 9.2) works with a single delivery team. On a small single-team project the two may be combined; on a multi-team project they must not be.

Senior supplier

Represents the supplier interest: those designing, developing, procuring, implementing and, where relevant, operating and maintaining the product.

Responsibilities:

• Confirms that the products can be delivered within the agreed cost and timescale — the achievable half of the business case test
• Commits supplier resources to the project
• Ensures the supplier's quality procedures and standards are applied
• Represents supplier interests in board decisions and exception handling

On a commercial project the senior supplier sits in the supplying organization, which makes the customer/supplier boundary an explicit part of the organization practice.

Project assurance

Provides the project board with independent assurance that the project is being conducted properly. It is a board responsibility, and the board may perform it directly or delegate it — but never to the project manager, because assurance must be independent of the role it assures.

Assurance follows the three interests:

In an agile context project assurance is the role that ensures product delivery includes governance checks — that the Definition of Done actually reflects the required standards, that quality activities are genuinely performed, and that reported progress corresponds to product that exists.

Project manager

Responsible for the day-to-day management of the project on behalf of the board, within the tolerances the board has set.

Responsibilities:

• Plans stages and manages delivery against them
• Agrees work packages with delivery teams, including tolerances and the Definition of Done
• Monitors progress, produces highlight reports, and raises exception reports when a tolerance is forecast to be breached
• Manages risks and issues, escalating those beyond delegated authority
• Maintains the business case on the executive's behalf
• Manages the interfaces between teams, suppliers and the wider organization

In a PRINCE2 Agile project the project manager's style shifts markedly. They manage work packages and tolerances, not individuals' daily tasks — the delivery team is self-managing within its work package. The relationship is one of servant leadership: removing impediments, providing context and shielding the team, rather than directing its work.

Project support

An administrative and information-management function, and — importantly for the exam — project support reports directly to the project manager.

Responsibilities:

• Administers the project's information: registers, logs, plans and reports
• Maintains the information held on project dashboards
• Manages configuration and version control of products
• Administers tooling and provides planning support
• Arranges and services workshops and board meetings

Where a project management office exists, it commonly provides project support. It is a support function, not a governance one: project support maintains the dashboard, but project assurance is what independently confirms the dashboard tells the truth.

The boundaries most often confused