PRINCE2 Product Description
The Product Descriptions should be created for all the products as part of the planning activities and before the Project Plan can be completed. Note: This is not optional.
How detailed should these Product Descriptions be?
There is no need to go into lots of detail, and existing standards should be referred to where possible. For example, in a new laptop computer project, you could say that the network adapter will support the Wi-Fi 802.11 without having to document this standard in detail.
Typical Content of the PRINCE2 Product Descrption
The typical content of a Product Description is well-documented in Appendix A of the manual.
It has such headings as:
- Identifier: Unique name
- Title: Name by which the product will be known
- Purpose: This states who needs the product, why they need it, and what it will do
- Composition: List of parts that the product will be made up of.
There are more headings and then there are five quality-related headings, which are listed below. I will explain each of them and give an example to help explain.
- Quality Criteria
- Quality Tolerance
- Quality Method
- Quality Skills required
- Quality Responsibilities
Quality Criteria
Quality criteria are a description of the product specifications that the product must meet. This includes all the quality measurements that will be used to check the product when created.
Let’s use for an example the keyboard of a laptop computer. Think of the quality measurements that will be used to check the keyboard, such as stress test, color-fading, letter-fading, key-pressing noise, layout, power usage.
You would need to have measurements for all of these. These are Quality Criteria.
Quality Tolerance
Quality Tolerance is similar to Quality Criteria, except here you define an acceptable range of values. For example, the letters on the keys cannot lose their color appearance under normal use for 10 years ±5%.
Quality Methods
These are the activities that will be used to check and approve Quality for the products – in other words, the methods used to check Quality.
For example, with the laptop keyboard, you could use a test machine that could simulate normal use of 20 years in a lesser number of days.
Perhaps you have been to an IKEA shop and seen the machines that test the furniture.
Quality Skills Required
Provide an indication of the Quality skills required to carry out the Quality tests
Quality Responsibilities
Here we define who does what, i.e., who will produce the product, who will review it and who will approve it. These Roles are known as: Producer, Reviewer and Approver.
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