History of PRINCE2
PRojects IN Controlled Environments (PRINCE) is a project management method. It covers the management, control and organisation of a project. “PRINCE2″ refers to the second major version of this method and is a registered trademark of the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), an independent office of HM Treasury of the United Kingdom.
PRINCE2 is derived from the earlier PRINCE project management method, which was initially developed in 1989 by the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) as a UK Government standard for information systems (IT) project management; however, it soon became regularly applied outside the purely IT environment. PRINCE2 was released in 1996 as a generic project management method. PRINCE2 has become increasingly popular and is now a de facto standard for project management in the UK. Its use has spread beyond the UK to more than 50 other countries.
The most current revision was released in 2009 as part of the Prince2:2009 refresh project by the Office of Government Commerce.
PRINCE2:2009 Refresh: Since 2006, the method has been revised and launched as “PRINCE2:2009 Refresh” on June 16th. The name “PRINCE2″ (instead of “PRINCE3″ or similar) is kept to demonstrate that the method remains faithful to its principles. Nevertheless, it is a fundamental revision of the method from 1996 to adapt it to the changed business environment, to make the method simpler and “lighter”, to address current weaknesses or misunderstandings, and to better integrate it with other OGC methods (ITIL, P3O, P3M3, MSP, M_o_R etc.). The main difference between the 2009 version and earlier versions is that there will be two manuals: ‘Managing Projects Using PRINCE2′ and ‘Directing Projects Using PRINCE2′. Both the Foundation and Practitioner Examinations will be based on the new ‘Managing Projects’ manual and will not include material from the new ‘Directing Projects’ book. The pass mark for the Foundation exam will remain unchanged but the pass mark for the Practitioner exam will increase from the current 50% to 55% as of July 6th. The Practitoner exam will also shorten in length from 3 hours to 2.5 hours.
