3.1 7 PRINCE2 Practices Overview

What the Practices Are

The practices are the aspects of project management that must be addressed continually and in parallel throughout a PRINCE2 project. In the 6th edition they were called themes; the 7th edition (PeopleCert, 2023) renamed them to practices to emphasise that they are applied, not merely understood. The current Foundation exam uses 7th-edition wording, so learn both names but answer with the practice names.

There are exactly seven practices. A reliable mnemonic is "Be Organised, Quick Planning Reduces Irritating Problems" — Business Case, Organizing, Quality, Plans, Risk, Issues, Progress.

The Seven Practices and Their Core Question

Note the two renamed practices: Organization → Organizing and Change → Issues. Foundation questions deliberately mix old and new labels to catch candidates revising from 6th-edition notes.

Practices Run Continuously

A common misconception is that each practice maps to one process. In reality every practice is woven through all seven processes. The Business Case, for example, is developed in Starting Up a Project, detailed in Initiating a Project, verified at every stage boundary, and confirmed during Closing a Project. The same continuous application is true of Risk, Quality, and the rest.

Each practice is also tailored to suit the project's scale and environment — one of the seven PRINCE2 principles. Tailoring may simplify a register into a log for a small project, but a practice can never be dropped entirely.

Each Practice Owns Management Products

The quickest way to score Foundation marks is to memorise which management products belong to each practice. The pattern is consistent: most practices have a management approach (a section of the Project Initiation Documentation, the PID) plus a register or log that records ongoing activity.

• Business Case → Business Case document + Benefits Management Approach
• Organizing → project management team structure + role descriptions + Communication Management Approach
• Quality → Quality Management Approach + Quality Register + Product Descriptions
• Plans → Project, Stage, Team and Exception Plans + Product Descriptions
• Risk → Risk Management Approach + Risk Register
• Issues → Issue Management Approach + Issue Register (+ Daily Log for minor issues)
• Progress → tolerances + Highlight, Checkpoint, End Stage, Exception Reports + Lessons Log

The 7th edition also adds two cross-cutting approaches addressed across several practices: the Sustainability Management Approach and the Digital and Data Management Approach. Sustainability is now one of the seven performance targets (alongside time, cost, quality, scope, benefit, and risk) that tolerances can be set against — a frequently tested 7th-edition addition.

How Practices Relate to Principles and Processes

PRINCE2 is built from four integrated elements, and Foundation questions frequently test whether you can tell them apart. The seven principles are the universal 'musts' (for example, continued business justification and manage by exception); they are mandatory and never tailored away. The seven practices are the aspects you apply to put those principles into action. The seven processes are the chronological activities of the project lifecycle, and the project context (including the seven people aspects and the project environment) wraps around them all.

The relationship is directional: principles guide the practices, and the practices are exercised inside the processes. For instance, the principle continued business justification is delivered through the Business Case practice, which is exercised across the Starting Up, Initiating, Managing a Stage Boundary, and Closing processes. If a question asks you to name an element, decide first whether it is a principle (a rule), a practice (an aspect), or a process (an activity).

Why Practices Matter for the Exam

The practices domain is the single largest source of Foundation questions because every management product and most decision rules live here. A few high-value facts recur:

• A practice is never optional — it can be tailored (scaled or simplified) but not removed, because removing one would break a principle.
• Most practices contribute a management approach to the PID and maintain a register or log during delivery.
• The four registers/logs (Risk Register, Issue Register, Quality Register, plus the Daily Log and Lessons Log) are dynamic records updated throughout the project, unlike baselined products such as the PID or a Product Description.
• A baseline is a fixed, agreed version of a product; changing it requires the Issues practice and formal change control.

Knowing which artefact is a baseline versus a dynamic record resolves a surprising number of distractor options on the real paper.

A final orientation point: the practices are deliberately listed in a logical order. You start by justifying the work (Business Case), then decide who does it (Organizing), agree what good looks like (Quality), work out how and when (Plans), anticipate uncertainty (Risk), control change to the baseline (Issues), and finally track delivery and decide whether to continue (Progress). Reading them in that sequence makes their interdependence obvious and is an easy way to reconstruct the full list under exam pressure.