In a related article, I explained the importance of planning and reviewed various considerations that must be properly thought through in creating your plan document.
I now want to move on and talk about what must be at the very heart of any PRINCE2 project – that of product-based planning, with a specific focus on planning with products, as this will be the mental leap that you will be required to do to become a powerful creator of plans.
You will undoubtedly be familiar with some of the existing methods and graphical presentations of planning techniques, such as the Gantt chart with its horizontal bar representing the tasks or activities of the project and possibly activity networks.
However, the PRINCE2 method does not expect you to start there. Instead, your initial planning methods will introduce you to some techniques that require a different approach when thinking about the project; techniques associated with product-based or product-lead planning.
Products and outcomes
Project deliverables in PRINCE2 are known as products, but although the deliverables are usually physical products, occasionally, a deliverable may be a soft product or outcome.
This may be a changed customer perception of the company. You can’t hold or kick a changed perception.
The planning problem
The traditional approach to planning that starts with the standard Gantt chart has a problem, which the following example illustrates. To draw a Gantt chart, you begin by listing the activities or tasks down the left side of the Gantt. You can put a task on the list for one of your projects; build the wall.
First, would you agree that building the wall is an activity or a task? Do you? Good, because it is. That is step one.
Step two is to draw a bar on the Gantt chart to show how long this activity should take. So how long does it take to build a brick wall?
You may immediately start thinking of questions: how long is it? Is it one or two bricks deep? How high he is the wall, because we may need scaffolding?
However, step two is not to start an argument but rather to draw a bar on the Gantt chart, so please answer my question on how long it takes to build the wall.
Focus first on what you must produce.
If those sorts of questions cross your mind, then great, because you will already think in the product lead way. First, you define the wall. When you are as clear as you can be about what you’re building, you can develop the activities you need to do to build a deliverable and more accurately predict how long the work will take.
In other words, the focus, first, is on what you produce, the products, and not the activities that build the products.
Products
Like several other approaches that use this deliverable focus, the PRINCE2 name for the deliverables is products, what the project produces.
If you’re heavily into activity planning, you may argue that you already think about what shall go to produce to come up with meaningful activities and timescales. If so, great.
You are already convinced of the value of the product-led approach and will feel at ease when it is expected in PRINCE2.
But you may find that this approach has considerably more power than you think, not least for progress control.
Thinking product before an activity is rather logical. How can you come up with meaningful and practical activities to build a wall unless you know what a wall is in this case?
Many projects need to be corrected initially because people list activities and estimate duration (as instructed by books and computer scheduling software) before knowing what the project requires.
That is often because the project plan pushes for this information to get the planning done.
Product based planning
With this approach, you first identify and plan the deliverables or products, then focus on the activities you need to build those products. This differs from the more traditional activity-driven approach, which starts with identifying activities and drawing up activity networks and Gantt charts.
It would be best if you had activity planning, and that is a vital element, but the approaching front ends that work is robust product planning. Hence it is a product lid or product-based approach to planning.
Thinking product is not particularly natural, whereas thinking activity is.
When you understand products, the approach is pretty straightforward. Some people understand the concept immediately, whereas others struggle for a bit and then get it.
And often, the people with the most planning experience find the idea tricky initially. Don’t worry; so did I, and then it clicked.
Identifying products in the project
The first step in product-based planning was to think about the products. You can make a list (although I will introduce a better technique).
In a project plan, you fall between 15 and 30 products to cover the whole project at a relatively consistent level of detail.
So what exactly is a product?
A product is something that one of the project team builds or produces. For example, review the business area and look at what it does.
The business process needs to be updated and needs overhaul and simplification. For example, many forms of business use or sections need to be more relevant, and people leave them blank. The review is intended to identify problems, make improvements, and then launch a revised procedure with new form designs.
So, what are the products? Remember, the products are something the team builds, so they are things you can hold your hands or, if they’re too big for that, you can click. In this example, the products are small:
- Existing desk instructions
- Diagram of the present procedures
- New procedure identification
- New form designs
- New form supplies
- New desk instructions
- New business procedure
- Identifying external products
When I look at the least, I now realize that the suppliers of the new forms don’t come from within the project or other from a local print shop, which is, quite obviously, not one of my project teams.
I Supply the shop with the designs; it prints the forms and can lose them to work hard back to make pads.
The shop’s work is separate from my project; the printer’s staff activities to do the work are not on my Gantt chart, and the shop does not send me progress reports or time sheets. The forms are essential to launching the new business procedure but come from outside the project boundary.
I also realize with a sudden flash of insight that the product’s desk instructions must exist. So although this is an essential document in the project, the project team does not have to create it.
Therefore, the existing desk instructions product is external as well; it comes over the project boundary from outside.
In the following article in my planning series, I will introduce you to the next step within planning: taking the products and showing the sequence in which they must be created. This is called the product flow diagram.
So I look forward to sharing the secrets of the second step that must be undertaken before you consider the activities and resources necessary to create the products.
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