Planning with products
In a previous related article, I explained the importance of planning and went through various considerations that need to be properly thought through as part of 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 in order 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 as 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 be totally 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 by a deliverable may be a soft product or outcome.
This may be something like 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 off with the familiar Gantt chart has a problem, which had the following example illustrates. To draw a Gantt chart, you start off by listing the activities or tasks down the left side of the Gantt. Here is a task you can put on the list for one of your projects; build the wall.
First of all, you will agree that build the wall is an activity or a task? You do? Good, because it is. That is step one.
Step two is to draw a bar on to 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 to cross your mind, then great, because you will already think in the product lead way. First you define wall. When you are as clear as you can be about what you’re building, then you can much more easily come up with 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 of all is on what you produce, the products, and not the activities that build the products.
Products
Like a number of 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 in order 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, and not least for progress control.
So, thinking product before activity is actually rather logical. How can you come up with meaningful activities and sensible a activities to build a wall unless you know what wall actually is in this case?
In fact, many projects go wrong right at the beginning because people do indeed list activities and estimate durations (has instructed by books and computer scheduling software) before knowing what the project requires.
In turn, that is often because project plan is push for this information to get the planning done.
Product based planning
With this approach you identify and plan the deliverables or products first, then turn your attention to the activities you need to build those products. This is different to the more traditional activity driven approach, which starts with identifying activities and drawing up activity networks and Gantt charts.
You need activity planning and that is a vital element, but the approach front ends that work his powerful 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 easy. Some people understand the concept immediately, whereas others struggle for a bit and then get it.
And often it is the people with the most planning experience the find the idea tricky at first. Don’t worry; so did I, and then it clicked.
Identifying products in the project
The first step in product based planning used to think what the products are. You can simply make a list (although I will introduce a technique that is far better).
In a project plan, you look fall between 15 and 30 products to cover the whole of the project at a fairly consistent level of detail.
So what exactly is a product?
Put simply, a product is something that one of the project team bills or produces. As an example, the Maginot line carry out a review of the business area and look at what it does.
The business process is outdated and in need of overhaul and simplification. For example, many of the forms of business uses or sections that aren’t relevant and people leave them blank. Review is intended to identify problems and make improvements, and then launch a revised procedure with new form designs as needed.
So, what are the products? Remember the products are something that the team builds, so they are things you can holding your hands or, if they’re too big for that, things 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 and it prints the forms and can lose them to work hard back to make pads.
The shops work is not part of 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 important to launch the new business procedure, but they come from outside the project boundary.
I also realize with a sudden flash of insight that the product existing desk instructions must already exist. So although this is an important document in the project, the project team does not have to create it.
The existing desk instructions product is therefore external as well, it comes over the project boundary from outside.
In the next article in my planning series, I will introduce you to the next step within planning, which is 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 with you the secrets of the second step that must be undertaken before you even think about the activities and resources necessary to create the products.
