Running PRINCE2 on ProjeQtOr: what maps, what does not

A question we are asked often enough to write down: can a project manager run a PRINCE2 project end to end inside ProjeQtOr alone, without falling back on spreadsheets? Mostly yes — and the three places where the answer is no are worth knowing before you commit, not after.

What follows is a mapping from PRINCE2® management products to the entities ProjeQtOr actually provides. Every claim was checked against the published user manual rather than against marketing copy. Where the two disagree, the manual wins and we say so.

Where each management product lives

That is a stronger showing than most tools in this class, and the document workflow is the reason. A PID that can be authored, versioned, routed to named approvers, approved with a recorded reason and then locked is a genuine substitute for the paper process — not a file attached to a task.

Three claims that do not survive checking

Material circulating about ProjeQtOr and PRINCE2 — including at least one confident, widely shared write-up — asserts three capabilities we could not find in the product’s own documentation. Each matters, and each has a workaround.

1. There is no Lessons Learned module

The claim that ProjeQtOr ships a dedicated lessons-learned entity is not supported by the manual; the term does not appear in its index. Since PRINCE2 treats learn from experience as a principle rather than an optional extra, this needs a deliberate answer.

What we do instead. A Lessons Log as a Document under the same approval workflow as the PID, versioned at each stage boundary, so lessons are reviewed and signed rather than accumulated. Where an organisation wants lessons to be searchable and reportable across projects, a dedicated ticket type with its own workflow and category list does that better, at the cost of a little configuration.

2. There is no Earned Value Management

ProjeQtOr does not calculate earned value. There is no CPI, no SPI and no EAC in the manual or its index. What it does hold is the input to those figures: planned work against real work, and planned cost against actual cost, per activity and per project.

What we do instead. For most engagements, planned-versus-actual variance reporting is what the board actually asks for, and ProjeQtOr produces it natively. Where a client genuinely requires EVM — and in our experience that is rarer than the literature suggests — the figures are derived outside the tool from data it already holds. We would rather state that plainly than configure something that looks like EVM and is not.

3. Baselines need verifying before you rely on them

This is the consequential one. Managing by exception is the PRINCE2 process that depends entirely on comparing today’s position against an agreed baseline — without that comparison, tolerance has nothing to be measured against.

The vendor’s feature list names project baselines. The user manual’s planning and configuration chapters describe forward planning and product versioning, but do not document a save-a-reference-and-compare mechanism, and the index carries no entry for it. We could not resolve that from the documentation alone.

What we do instead. We settle it in a pilot before anything is promised. If native baselining works as the feature list implies, tolerance reporting is configured on it. If it does not, the stage plan is frozen as an approved Document at each stage boundary and variance is reported against that. The second approach is less elegant and entirely defensible to an auditor, which is the test that matters.

Mapping the roles

PRINCE2 defines who decides what, and a tool that cannot express that hierarchy will not hold the method for long. ProjeQtOr’s access profiles carry it reasonably well:

The separation in the first row is the one worth insisting on. A board that can quietly edit the plan it is supposed to be authorising is not a board, and configuring that boundary is a governance decision rather than a technical one.

The verdict

ProjeQtOr binds technical execution — Gantt, timesheets, activities — to methodological control — risks, issues, change requests, documents and quality records — in one AGPL-licensed system that runs inside your own perimeter. For an organisation running PRINCE2 without the budget or the appetite for a proprietary portfolio suite, it covers the great majority of the method natively.

It does not cover all of it. The lessons log has to be built, earned value is not there, and baselining needs proving before tolerance reporting is designed on top of it. None of those is a reason to reject the tool. All three are reasons to scope the work properly rather than assume the method arrives in the box.

PRINCE2® is a registered trademark of PeopleCert. IPTREK is not an accredited training organisation; we provide consulting, tailoring and organisation-specific coaching.