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Product Descriptions and Specifications

There are many types of specifications that are used in various types of projects. These might be: Requirements, Functional, Design, Test, etc. They all tend to be part of a process to translate requirements or needs into some solution or business change. Each Specification will have a corresponding Product Description.

Requirements and Functional specifications tend to state 'What' and design specifications generally state 'How'. The specialist products tend to cover the 'What' and the 'How' and the solution itself.

A specification is nothing more than a packaging of a type of information. A specification can contain the equivalent of a number of product descriptions. This information describes the contents of products produced later in the project. A key principle is that a specification (or composition of a PD) for a specific deliverable or product is only included in the project documentation once.

Many specifications have more than just product descriptions. For example some specifications describe the people involved, such Skills, knowledge, experience, roles, responsibilities, etc. In addition, the specification might include pictures (diagrams) showing how the individual products work together. These all add value to the identification of the right products to be in the solution.

Some of these specifications can be created during the Initiation Stage to help improve the quality of the PID.

The Training Course Development example includes examples of using specifications and the approximate equivalent Product Descriptions. See the following examples to see the differences:

Training Course Development with Specifications

Training Course Development with roughly equivalent Product Descriptions.

These examples show there are many valid ways to package information describing the results to be achieved and the corresponding work to be performed. The tradeoffs relate to the number of products that need to be created and reviewed.

In addition to the number of products that are produced, there can be differences in the number of activities or tasks that are used to track the completion of the products. With specifications, the activities or tasks identify the sections that are produced and the effort required to create these sections. With a product based approach, a work package may be used to logically group the products together into a unit of work that can be developed as a unit. The example PBP files in the above examples demonstrate these differences.

These types of tradeoffs are generally determined when 'Designing a Plan' (for PRINCE2™ users this is PL1 2005 or the Plans Theme 2009).



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