The PRINCE2 7 Product Description
The purpose of a product description is to describe a product’s purpose, composition, derived from,
and quality specifications. It is produced at the planning time, as soon as possible after the need for
the product is identified.
Identifier: the product name or a unique identifier if the project has a large number of products
Version: the current version number of the product description
Purpose: the purpose of the product, how it will be used, and who will use it
Composition: a list of the product’s components or parts
Derived from: the source of this product, such as a design, a commercial product, an existing
system to be upgraded or replaced, or a statement of expected benefits
Quality specifications: the functional and non-functional requirements for the product along with
their associated measures
Development or production approach and skills required: a description of how the product is
expected to be developed or produced and any special skills, facilities, or equipment required
Quality tolerance: the ranges within which key quality specifications can vary and remain
acceptable
Quality methods and quality skills required: the quality methods (such as verification, test, and
inspection) to be used to check that the product meets its quality specification and the indication of
skills required to perform the quality control activities
Responsibilities: the producer, reviewer, and acceptance authority for the product.
Supporting information
Quality specifications
Here, you set down what quality criteria the product must satisfy for it to be complete and then approved. You will need to be able to measure quality criteria or you cannot determine whether the product meets them.
Coming up with measurable quality criteria can take careful thought. If you can, avoid the general criteria such as “Must be easy to use“ without carefully defining exactly what you mean by that phrase.
General quality criteria like the one above, is wide open to opinion. You can guarantee therefore, that when it comes to accepting the product or not, your customer or user will debate long and hard that the product is not what they wanted.
Quality tolerance
Quality tolerance is also a difficult term to define. A tolerance, by definition, has a plus and minus boundary to a stated measure. Many project products just are not like that, one example is the speed of the new machine for the production line that is being procured within the project.
Producing a unit with the machine must not take more than 3 seconds, but should not be faster than 2 seconds because this is unnecessarily expensive as well as disruptive to the rest of the production line.
Many products in business projects do not have a tolerance, so again, just leave this section blank if it is not relevant to the product.
Quality method
The quality methods section specifies how you will measure whether the product has met its criteria or not. How you do this depends on the nature of the product.
Sometimes, you can measure with a ruler – For example, a report must be on A4 Paper. At other times, the measure is a judgment of whether managers agree that they can understand the report.
In the case of judgment, it is important to name the individual who will make that judgment so that you can agree upfront precisely the criteria upon which the product will be charged.
Quality skills required
You will want to think carefully about skills for the quality checks. The reason for this is that introducing the word “Skills “Into the heading is confusing, because you may want to choose someone precisely because of their lack of skill.
For example, if you have an instruction Manual for a new Computer System, the last person you want to check that Manual is a team member who helped write the system and who already knows exactly how it works.
Instead, you need someone who’s never seen the system before – A complete novice if you will. The quality check would be simply sitting that person down in front of your product along with the Manual, and ask them to enter the new customer record as an example. If they cannot follow the Manual or it is confusing to them then you will know the rewrite is necessary.
But for some technical products, you may indeed want a highly skilled and professionally qualified person to conduct the tests. Sometimes such an individual will come from an independent third-party supplier such as those who provide professional standards services for health and safety.
Quality responsibilities
There are potentially three individuals involved here. The first is for the person who created the product or produced it, the second is the individual who will check and carry out the quality tests, and the third is the person who will approve the product.
In some cases, the individual who carries out the quality check and approves the product may be the same person.
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