PRINCE2 Product Based Planning
Product Based Planning (PBP)
This is referenced within the Plans Theme, and the product based planning technique is used whenever a “real” Plan is needed – these are:
- Project Plan
- Stage Plan
- Optional Team Plan
- Exception Plan if needed.
- Remember that within product based planning, a product is something that the specialist team builds, they are usually physical – anything that you can hold or kick!
So during product based planning, examples may be:
- software
- hardware
- a building
- document
- trained individual (you don’t make the person of course, but you deliver training in some way so that the product is an individual with new or enhanced knowledge, skills and experience)
- a diagram
- a procedure
- a refurbishment
- etc….
Activity based planning
You are probably more familiar with bar charts or Gantt Charts as the start point in planning. These contain the activities in a plan – still vital and used within a PRINCE2 plan, but they are NOT what must be identified first NOR are they part of PRINCE2 product based planning as we shall see…
The power of product based planning is that by starting with the product and not just thinking first about its activities, is that PRINCE2 ‘forces’ you to think through exactly what the product is, plus other characteristics such as quality criteria.
Imagine that you are going to create a document ‘help guide’ for the use of a new facility. If you start just thinking about the activities that are involved, how do you know how long they are going to take and the resources and work involved?
You don’t know that because you have not FIRST thought through ‘what exactly do we mean by a ‘Help Guide’? This is where PRINCE2 product based planning come into its own…
PRINCE2 product based planning – there are 4 steps:
- Create the Project Product Description for the End Product (this step is only needed when creating the Project Plan – but it starts its life within the Project Brief)
- Create the Product Breakdown Structure (PBS)
- Create Product Descriptions (if needed) for lower-level products
- Create the Product Flow Diagram (PFD)
I will not cover the creation of the Project Product Description here (even though it is the first step within product based planning , as I have described in other articles.
Rather, I’ll just remind you that:
- It is a document.
- It is created only once for the project
- it contains the customer’s quality expectations and acceptance criteria
- it is updated at the end of every stage
- the project is deemed finished once the acceptance criteria has been accepted.
Again, the Product descriptions are dealt with in detail in other articles, but I shall summarize them here:
- they are a document
- they are written in consultation with the users
- they contain the product quality criteria
- they are used to create, quality check, and authorize completion of the product
- one will be written for each specialist product in your project
The PBS is a hierarchical diagram used within product based planning and does not show product creation sequence. It breaks the End Product down into lower levels of products as part of product based planning. If you visualize a bottle of water – that would be the end product, and at lower levels you would have the plastic container, the cap, the label, and the water content itself.
The PBS does NOT show the sequence of creation of the products – it is a hierarchy showing how each product level ‘breaks down’. There can be no one-to-one connections (only one product underneath another – it must always break down into two or more products underneath.
A product is described by a NOUN or OUTCOME (Brick Wall, New Brick Wall, etc.) Tasks are NEVER shown on the PBS or PFD. A task would have a NOUN and VERB (dig hole, write report, design the widget, etc.)
The Product Breakdown Structure
The product at the very top of the PBS is the End Product, this is also the last product shown in the PFD.
Products shown without other products underneath them are called SIMPLE Products in product based planning. THEREFORE, all remaining products in the “middle” of the PBS are called INTERMEDIATE Products. There are TWO types of Intermediate products:
- COLLECTIVE. These can be drawn as a rhomboid (squashed rectangle!) These are NOT real products, and just help the planner to include/brainstorm all the real products underneath. So use the words Group, or Grouping to describe them.
Think of a collective within product based planning as representing a “theme” where the products underneath have some common trait – such as Food Group, Hardware Group, Document Group, etc.). An example above is the ‘Food Group’ - INTEGRATION. These are real products, and the products underneath them are combined in some way to become the Integration product. The shape of an Integration product can be the same as a simple or end-product, a rectangle.
A simple example might be “Prepared Chicken Curry”, and underneath this, sit the food products, that are combined to make the curry ( chicken breast, herbs, spices, garlic, tomatoes, etc.) An example above is ‘Prepared fruit Punch’.
External Products
These are shown within product based planning as an ELLIPSE. An external product is needed by the project, but must pass one of the following tests:
- It already exists. For example, a catalogue/price list, a tool or piece of equipment, an existing product, an existing document, etc….
- The creation of the product is outside the control of the project, for example “Planning Permission”, “Drained Swamp”. Other examples might be another project creating a product that we need.
Note that an External Product does not require a Work Package nor Checkpoints. Whenever an external product is identified within product based planning, , it should be accompanied with a linked risk (it may not be available, or it may not meet specifications for example).
Just because the project manager issues a Work Package to a Third Party does NOT make the products inside the work page ‘external’. You take ALL the products types from the PBS – APART FROM THE INTERMEDIATE COLLECTIVE (Rhomboid) Products – and transfer them to the Product Flow Diagram (PFD).
The Product Flow Diagram
The PFD shows “the sequence of creation of the products” within product based planning , and is drawn with arrows showing sequence and dependencies. Refer to the diagram below as an example:
The Plan Document
That concludes the aspects of product based planning within a PRINCE2 plan, but for completeness, here are the typical remaining steps to complete the plan document:
- identify the activities need to create each product
- estimate each activity (duration, resources, cost, and work)
- create the schedule of activities (their sequence and dependencies)
- Assign resources to each activity
- include risk response and communication activities
- perform resource levelling if needed
- include controls
- add the text such as introduction, constraints, scope, etc…
Product based planning from structure to flow.
The PRINCE2 method details the approach made to planning as an initial three steps; create the project product description, create the product breakdown structure, and then create the product flow diagram.
I have covered this information elsewhere in a previous article, and so my intention here is to give you some guidance which goes beyond the official Manual.
When you initially create your first attempt at a product breakdown structure you may find that your ideas were a bit random unless of course that you know the project area very well. Just like writing a report, it’s best to leave it overnight, and then revisit it the next day as this will give you a fresh insight and allow you to spot omissions or improvements more easily.
The product breakdown structure (PBS) is a simple hierarchical diagram with the categories and sub categories of products with the actual products themselves being described at the lowest all bottom level.
You would then want to take those bottom level products and use them to create the product flow diagram.
Take the example product breakdown structure below:
The above diagram shows the product list at its lowest level, the visual check is to spot each box that has nothing underneath it. These are the lowest level products that will be taken next to form the product flow diagram.
The product at the very top is the end-product that the project product description would have been written around. This therefore represents the whole project and when the product flow diagram is created this would be the final product in the sequence.
PRINCE2 Intermediate Products
But between the top and bottom products, there are intermediate products. These usually described a particular category or a grouping. For example the product called ‘prepared fruit punch’ is a real product and it consists of the ‘juiced oranges’, ‘juiced lemons’ and ‘blended wine’.
Whereas the intermediate product called ‘food group’ is not a real product at all but just a temporary title given to all of the real products that exist below it. As you can see I’ve actually called it a group to make it obvious to the reader that it is an intermediate product, but I could have given it a different and agreed shape for intermediate products such as a rhomboid for example.
There may be some products that are either already exist, or have been created in an earlier stage of this project, or of another project. These products should be included as their existence is needed in order to complete this particular project. It is suggested that an ellipse may be used to differentiate between an external product and an internal product.
Be clear however, that external products will not be created by this current project but that they are needed in order to complete this current project.
So to summarise, the only products that are taken to the product flow diagram are; the end-product, intermediate real products, external products, and the lowest level products.
Structuring the structure.
“one man’s meat is another man’s poison” quotes the old rather sexist saving! And the same is true for when creating the product breakdown structure. If two separate and independent groups produce the product breakdown structure for the same project, it is highly likely that there will be some differences between them even though potentially, both of them would deliver the correct end result.
To use a rather trite example, if you are producing the product breakdown structure of a family car you may decide to group the categories in terms of body shell, chassis, engine, brakes, and so on.
Another team may produce the product breakdown structure in terms of third party parts, common parts, furnishings and fittings, mechanical parts, electrical parts, and so on. You could see that both structures could end up with a complete car even though the structure diagrams may look completely different.
Before I leave the example of a family car it’s worth mentioning again the intermediate products. Remember that I said only the integration type of products would be transferred to the product flow diagram, whereas the categories or groupings which are merely an invented device to help create the product breakdown structure, or will not be transferred.
These integration intermediate type products would need to be transferred to the product flow diagram. An example here might be the gear box as this would consist of various gears, splines, sprockets, brackets and mouldings.
Therefore, in terms of the product flow diagram sequence, all of the above lower level products such as gears would need to be shown the first within the sequence, ultimately flowing into the gear box itself as the final sub products within the car if you will.
In terms of the depth of the structure you would want this to be fairly evenly balanced with the same level of detail throughout. An example of a mobile thought through a product breakdown structure could be the body shell product of the car being at the same level as, say, the disc brake pads. This would signify an unbalanced structure whose main crime would be making the diagram harder to read and interpret.
In extreme circumstances, for example if little is known about the project or the business area, getting an initial team together and simply brainstorming the product flow diagram is a great place to start.
The products that have been identified will certainly not be all of them, but the initial product flow diagram can be used to extract ideas and thoughts and talking to many other people possibly over several days, to add products to this initial product flow diagram.
Carrying out this exercise very early in the project can be a neat way of defining the project scope!
Fairly obviously, the product flow diagram will show the sequence in which you planned to produce them which is why the end-product mentioned above is the last product to be shown in the product flow diagram.
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