In practice, the need for some of these roles depends on the size and complexity of the project and the organizational structure of the company or authority carrying out the project. For example, a small organization carrying out only two or three small projects a year may not require, or indeed be able to afford, many of these roles. Having received the commission from the client, a good project manager supported by a planner, a procurement manager and established well-documented quality control and risk procedures may well be able to deliver the specified requirements.

The detailed descriptions of the earlier roles are given in the relevant sections dealing with each topic, but the last two roles warrant some further discussion.

A project board or steering committee is sometimes set up for large projects to act as a supervising authority, and sometimes as a champion, during the life cycle of the project. Its job is to ensure that the interests of the sponsoring organization (or client) are protected and that the project is run and delivered to meet the requirements of these organizations. The project board appoints the project manager, and the project manager must report to the project board on a regular basis and obtain from it the authority to proceed after certain predetermined stages have been reached.

National or local government projects following the PRINCE methodology frequently have a project board, as the project may affect a number of different departments who are all stakeholders to a greater or lesser extent. The board is thus usually constituted from senior managers (or directors) of the departments most closely involved in the project. A project board may also be desirable where the client consists of a number of companies who are temporary partners in a special consortium set up to deliver the project. A typical example is a consortium of a number of oil producers who each have a share in a refinery, drilling platform or pipeline either during the construction or operating phase, or both.

Ideally, the board should only be consulted or be required to make decisions on major issues, as unnecessary interference with the normal running of a project will undermine the authority of the project manager. However, there may be instances where fundamental disagreements or differences of interests among functional departments or stakeholders need to be discussed and resolved, and it is in such situations that the project board can play a useful role.

The project support office briefly described in Chapter 2 is only required on large projects, where it is desirable to service all the project administration and project technology by a central department or office, supervised by a service manager. The functions most usually carried out by the project support office are the preparation and updating of the project schedule (programme), collection and processing of time sheets, progress reports, project costs and quality reports, operating configuration management and controlling the dissemination of specifications, drawings, schedules and other data.

The project support office is in fact the secretariat of the project and its size, and its constitution will therefore depend on the size of the project, its technical complexity and its administrative procedures and reporting requirements. The administrative procedures and reporting requirements can be very onerous where the client organization is a consortium of companies, each of which requires its own reporting procedures, cost reports and timetable for submission.

Ideally, the accounting system for the project should be self-contained and independent of the corporate accounting system. Clearly, a monthly cost report will have to be submitted to the organization’s accounts department, but project accounting will give speedier and more accurate cost information to the project manager, which will enable him or her to take appropriate action before the costs spiral out of control. The project support office can play a vital role in this accounting function provided that the office staff includes the project accountants. These accountants control not only the direct costs such as labour, materials, equipment and plant but also those indirect costs and expenses related to the project.