PrinceLite Presentation @ BCS

I was lucky enough to be asked to attend a presentation last night on a newly developed Software Engineering Methodology PrinceLite. PrinceLite was developed by Dr Peter Merrick and the way i see it aims to over come two main problems with project management firstly the excessive amount of bureaucracy and secondly to overcome unclear requirements or as Dr. Merrick puts it unambiguous business requirements specification. He defines some clear benefits of princeLite as the following:

The key benefits of PrinceLite are:

• it addresses cultural and political challenges introducing 'Project Contemplation' as an essential part of the method.
• it integrates the business team and development team through the common language of requirements
• senior management sign-off on prototypes (normally), because people don't read long documents
• only artifacts (products/documents) that add demonstrateable value are produced.
• the basis of all artifacts is pictorial therefore artifacts are short but highly accurate
• method that stresses the possibility of early lifecycle requirements that can be used as part of a rigorous effort estimation programme
• write accurate business requirements specifications that can be used in procurement (tenders, ITT, RFP) to solicit fixed price quotations instead of time and materials estimates
• it is straightforward; although complex (lots of simple elements) it is not complicated therefore it is understandable to a business audience. As an end-to-end approach it delivers unambiguous specifications to architects, designers, programmers and testers.

There are some very good reasons to implement 'some parts' of this methodology but i for one am not entirely sold until i have done more research and can see a greater amount of successful case studies. For more information on PrinceLite can be found at Dr. Peter Merrick's site PrinceLite