Project Management

Updated on 22 September 2026. What’s new: rewritten for PRINCE2 7, where the seven themes are now the seven practices and organizing and issues replace organization and change.

If you searched for the PRINCE2 themes, here is the short answer: in PRINCE2 7 they are called the seven practices. They are business case, organizing, plans, quality, risk, issues and progress. Five names survived the rename unchanged; organization became organizing and change became issues. Each practice is a part of project management that has to be looked after from the first day of the project to the last, not in one phase only.

The word "theme" belongs to the sixth edition, published in 2017, and to the earlier versions before it. PRINCE2 7 arrived in 2023, and PeopleCert, which owns PRINCE2 and runs its exams, now describes the Foundation syllabus as seven principles, seven practices and seven processes, plus roles, people management, project performance, digital and data management, communication and tailoring. This article goes through the practices one at a time: what each one controls, which management products carry it, who makes the decisions inside it, how the seven lean on each other when a real project goes off course, and how the Foundation and Practitioner exams turn all of this into questions. Everything here was checked against PeopleCert's pages in September 2026.