Management Products Alternative Packaging

NOTE: This topic is for those people implementing PRINCE2™ in an organisation. Please use the Management Products topic if you are working towards foundation or practitioner exams. This topic is still under development. Any feedback appreciated.

When looking at the implementation of management products in an organisation,many of the practices for software design can be applied to the way the process information can be packaged. The following principles can be applied:

• Information is only created and maintained in one place
• Separate Project Specific from Project Class Information
• Separate Project Management information from Technical Information
• Maintain traceability of information as it is refined in various documents information.
• Maintain traceability of changes in the set of documents.
• Conduct a minimum number of quality reviews with maximum value
• Obtain a minimum number of approvals of management products

These principles allow each product to be seen as set of information that can be created, maintained, and packaged into documents and reviewed, and approved as a unit. Here are some approaches to simplifying the packaging of PRINCE2™ Management Product Information and reduce duplication of information, the number of quality reviews and approvals for the management products:

1) Identify requirements for Outline and Initial (Baselined) versions of documents

For example:

Produce an Outline Business Case in SU and a Initial Business Case in the Initiation Stage.

Produce a Project Brief in SU and a Revised (if necessary) Project Brief in the Initiation Stage.

Produce an Outline Project Plan in SU and a Initial Project Plan in the Initiation Stage.

Produce an Outline Project Quality Plan in SU and a Initial Project Quality Plan in the Initiation Stage

The documents are updated to new versions as authorisation is received. In this way, SU is seen as a quick first pass through the Initiation Stage products.

Any Technical evaluations or other tradeoff information should be packaged into Specialist Products to allow traceability through these product areas. For example, Technical Requirements for a solution should be retained as part of the specialist products not as part of the management products.

Using this approach, the same document is reviewed and updated providing traceability and consistency across the documentation set.

See the Software Development Project Example

2) Multiple Approvals of documents constitute a PID.

Once a set of individual documents have been approved, the PID is approved.

For example, approvals for the following with the required information can be equivalent to the approval of the PID.:

Project Brief
Project Plan

Business Case

Project Quality Plan

NOTE: The composition of these products would be slightly different from the published product descriptions though all of the same information would be available.

3) Consolidate all 'How' information into a Project Quality Plan

The generally accepted purpose of a Project Quality Plan is to describe 'how' a project will be run. With this purpose in mind, any project specific information such as Acceptance Criteria or other unique specifications may be moved to their respective product descriptions or quality criteria or separate products, such as an Acceptance Test Specifications or Procedures or equivalent.

Any specific information about how the project will be run should be retained in the Project Quality Plan. This would include the Configuration Management Plan, Communications Plan, Change Control, or Quality Review or Quality Check procedures. If these exist at an organisational level in a Quality Management System (Quality Manual). This information can be referenced rather than duplicated in the Project Quality Plan.

This allows some key documents for projects to be available for use across a class of projects without any changes. This can save considerable time during startup and initiation of a project.

An alternative approach to packaging can be seen on the following picture. This picture has the same management products as the set described in the PRINCE2™ manual (See Management Products), however, has been reorganised according to the principles above. Examples of processes with this alternative packaging can be found at: Process Aide or Process Assets

 

The following PBP file contains the full set of management products for PRINCE2 2005 and 2009. The image below is the products as a PBS:

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Revision: 4.0.0

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