Flow Structures
The order that products are created or acquired can have a significant impact on the successful completion of a project. If products are developed in the wrong order, there may be significant rework, unplanned development or loss of resources at critical times.
Underlying these dependencies is the importance of actually completing the products to a known degree of completion. A 90% completed product may not have any value where a fully complete product under configuration management may provide a stable base for development of later products.
There are a number of visual approaches to identification and management of the order that products are completed. The types of visual diagrams that are available are:
See Product Flow Diagram Examples
Product Flow Diagram (PFD)
A Product Flow Diagram (PFD) is described in the Product Based Planning Technique of PRINCE2™. This diagram identifies the order that products need to be completed and the products that are necessary to be completed before other products can complete.
Some examples of PFDs are provided in the PRINCE2™ Manual.
(This web site uses the PFD to represent the order for the completion of Products)
Precedence or Network Diagram
A precedence or network diagram generally identifies the relationship between tasks in a plan. These relationships are generally used when scheduling the tasks to ensure that the necessary task dependencies are met relative to the completion of a task. The relationships are generally:
- Start to Finish
- Start to Start
- Finish to Finish
- Finish to Start
In this type of diagram, the tasks are represented as boxes.
In a similar way to the product flow diagram, a product can be represented by a task and the relationships can be applied to the other tasks that represent products. In this way, the equivalent of a Product Flow Diagram can be created using this type of diagram.
This web site uses the Network Diagram generated by MS Project to show the relationship among activities or tasks
PERT Chart
A PERT Chart (Programme Evaluation and Review Technique) identifies the tasks on the line between start or completion nodes. The purpose of this diagram is essentially the same as the Precedence or Network Diagram.
In this type of diagram, the tasks are represented as lines between start and end nodes.
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