Tailoring people and context

Tailoring is a PRINCE2 principle and part of the project context element. PRIN-110 explained the principle in general: everything except the principles can be adapted, tailoring happens at organizational and project level, and decisions should be recorded. This lesson applies tailoring to the people element. How should board composition, change management, team leadership and communication be scaled for a small internal project, a large multi-supplier program component, an agile product team, a public sector initiative or an international partnership? The aim is the same in every case: enough structure to make the people aspects work, and no more.

What drives people-related tailoring

Several features of a project's context determine how much effort the people element needs. The more people affected by change, the more change management is needed. The more organizations involved, the more effort goes into relationships and joint ways of working. The more stakeholders with power and interest, the more structured communication becomes. The less experienced the team, the more support and closer delegation it needs. And the more the culture differs from the project's way of working, the more deliberate the adaptation must be.

A people tailoring score

As with general tailoring, a simple scoring matrix helps make people-related tailoring decisions consistent and explainable. It does not replace judgment, but it prompts the right questions and gives assurance a basis for checking the decisions.

Small projects

On a small internal project with a handful of people and limited change, the people element can be very light. The executive and senior user may be one person. Communication may be a short section of the project initiation document listing who needs to know what. Change management may consist of a briefing by the affected team's manager and a short how-to guide. Team ways of working may be agreed in a 20-minute conversation. None of this removes the need to think about people; it simply scales the response.

Agile environments

Agile ways of working place strong emphasis on people: self-organizing teams, close collaboration with users, frequent feedback and servant leadership. In many ways they align naturally with the PRINCE2 7 people element. Tailoring typically maps PRINCE2 roles onto agile roles, as discussed in lesson 4, and uses agile practices to deliver people-related outcomes. Daily stand-ups and retrospectives support team communication and learning. Sprint reviews give users a regular, two-way channel. Product owners embed user input into delivery.

Two tailoring points need care. First, management by exception still applies: the board sets tolerances, usually with scope as the main flexible target and time and cost fixed, and the team self-organizes within them. Second, agile teams can become isolated from wider stakeholders if communication is left entirely to sprint reviews. The communication management approach should still cover stakeholders beyond the immediate product owner, such as operations, support, finance and affected staff who never attend a review.

Projects within programs

When a project sits inside a program, many people arrangements are provided at program level. The program may run a central communications team, own stakeholder relationships with senior external parties, employ business change managers and set standards for engagement. The project should tailor its own arrangements to fit, using program channels rather than duplicating them, and agreeing clearly which stakeholders it engages directly and which the program handles. Duplicate or conflicting messages from a project and its program confuse stakeholders quickly.

Multi-organization projects

Where several organizations work together, as customer, suppliers, partners or joint venture members, the people element needs more structure. The board may include representatives of several organizations, each bringing different cultures and commercial interests. Joint ways of working, a shared risk register where possible, an agreed decision-making process and an escalation ladder that crosses organizational boundaries become essential. The relationship health check from lesson 3 is a useful tool here, as are joint workshops at the start of each stage.

Public sector and regulated contexts

Public sector projects often have additional people requirements: transparency obligations, consultation duties, official languages, accessibility standards, union agreements and political oversight. Regulated industries may require specific competencies, documented training and formal sign-offs. These requirements shape tailoring by adding formality to communication, consultation and roles.

In Canada, federal projects may need to meet official languages requirements, the Accessible Canada Act, duties to consult Indigenous peoples where Crown decisions may affect Aboriginal or treaty rights, and collective agreements that govern changes to public servants' work. Provincial projects have equivalent requirements. These are part of the context to be recognized at initiation and reflected in communication and change plans.

International and distributed projects

Projects that span countries combine cultural distance, time zones and sometimes language differences. People tailoring may include translation of key communications, scheduling meetings fairly across time zones, choosing tools that work in all locations and allowing more time for decisions that require consultation in several cultures. Ways of working should be explicit and written. Social contact, which builds the trust that delegation depends on, needs deliberate planning when people rarely meet in person.

Recording people-related tailoring

People-related tailoring decisions belong in the project initiation documentation alongside other tailoring decisions. Typical entries cover board composition and any combined roles, the scale of change management, the communication management approach, team ways of working, arrangements with program or supplier organizations and any context-specific requirements. Recording them allows the board to approve the approach, assurance to check that the people element has not been neglected and future projects to learn from what worked.

Tailoring as the project evolves

People-related tailoring should be reviewed at each stage boundary, just like other tailoring. Projects often change shape: a design stage with a small core team may give way to a rollout stage affecting thousands of people, or a single supplier may be joined by several subcontractors. The arrangements that fitted the early stages may be inadequate later. A useful habit is to re-run the people tailoring score at each boundary and compare it with the arrangements in place. If the score has moved up a band, the project manager should propose stronger arrangements to the board, such as a dedicated change lead, a formal stakeholder engagement plan or a joint governance forum with suppliers.

The reverse also happens. A project that began with extensive arrangements because of uncertainty may be able to simplify once relationships are established and risks have reduced. Reducing reporting frequency, merging meetings or widening tolerances as trust grows frees time for delivery. Either way, the change and its reason should be recorded so that assurance can see that the people element is still being managed deliberately.