Product Based Planning Demystified – Part 6
The PRINCE2 method refers to two categories a product: specialist and management.
Specialist products and management products
The specialist products are basically the ones that teams build, although if you specialist products may be external and come into the project from outside.
The management products are the things being used for project management, including products such as the risk register, the business case, and the project initiation documentation.
You use the management products to manage the production of the specialist products, and in the diagrams, you normally model the specialist products only.
The value of product-based planning for project control
I will not be going to much detail here, but merely point out that using a product-based approach to planning, also opens the door to very specific quality control and also superb progress monitoring.
Consider this. Suppose you ask the team what their progress is part way through a task. You will probably get an opinion or a guess. Once you enter that on to your plan to see whether you are on track, you are basing future work and the finishing date on that guess.
The project plan can be seen as a chain and is only as strong as the weakest link. A guess of progress on a particular task is your weak link.
Now contrast this if you were to use product-based planning. Your schedule will include key planned dates of completion for specific products. Each product will have a product description containing its quality criteria along with the checks needed and the resources required to carry out such quality checks.
There is no longer any need to base the future of your project on guesses, because the milestone points on the plan will represent completed products. Although you may still wish to gauge an estimate of completion for a particular product or part way through, you will always be able to get a 100% accurate declaration from the team when asking has the product finished? In either has or it has not.
Check out this diagram one more time:
You will note above, that the product-based planning technique is covered in step two.
The remaining steps cover a more traditional planning approaches by identifying the activities, resources, the work required, and the duration of each task that is needed to create each product.
Step five is creating the schedule traditionally done by using a network diagram and a Gantt chart, and then finally creating the plan document itself. Note the central * activity called “analysing risks”.
My final point to make here, is that risks will be identified from the outset of the above steps right through to the end. Risks need to be managed, and that means new activities will need to be added to the plan along with their associated resources.
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