Product Based Planning

• Project Plan
• Stage Plan
• Optional Team Plan
• Exception Plan if needed.

Product-based planning.

There are 4 steps:

1. Create the Project Product Description for the End Product (this step is only needed when creating the Project Plan - but it starts its life within the Project Brief)
2. Create the Product Breakdown Structure (PBS)
3. Create Product Descriptions (if needed) for lower-level products
4. Create the Product Flow Diagram (PFD)

The PBS is a hierarchical diagram and does not show product creation sequence. It breaks the End Product down into lower levels of products. If you visualize a bottle of water – that would be the end product, and at lower levels you would have the plastic container, the cap, the label, and the water content itself.

The PBS does NOT show the sequence of creation of the products - it is a hierarchy showing how each product level 'breaks down'. There can be no one-to-one connections (only one product underneath another – it must always break down into two or more products underneath. 

A product is described by a NOUN or OUTCOME (Brick Wall, New Brick Wall, etc) Tasks are NEVER shown on the PBS or PFD. A task would have a NOUN and VERB (dig hole, write report, design the widget, etc)

The product at the very top of the PBS is the End Product, this is also the last product shown in the PFD.

Products shown without other products underneath them are called SIMPLE Products. THEREFORE, all remaining products in the “middle” of the PBS are called INTERMEDIATE Products. There are TWO types of Intermediate products:

1.      COLLECTIVE. These can be drawn as a rhomboid (squashed rectangle!) These are NOT real products, and just help the planner to include/brainstorm all the real products underneath. So use the words Group, or Grouping to describe them. Think of a collective as representing a “theme” where the products underneath have some common trait – such as Food Group, Hardware Group, Document Group, etc).

2.      INTEGRATION. These are real products, and the products underneath them are combined in some way to become the Integration product. The shape of an Integration product canbe  the same as a simple or end-product, a rectangle. A simple example might be “Prepared Chicken Curry”, and underneath this, sit the food products, that are combined to make the curry ( chicken breast, herbs, spices, garlic, tomatoes, etc)

EXTERNAL PRODUCTS. These are shown as an ELLIPSE. An external product is needed by the project, but must pass one of the following tests:

1.      It already exists. For example, a catalogue/pricelist, a tool or piece of equipment, an existing  
         product, an existing document, etc….

2.      The creation of the product is outside the control of the project, for example “Planning Permission”,
         “Drained Swamp”. Other examples might be another project creating a product that we need.

Note that an External Product does not require a Work Package nor Checkpoints. Whenever an external product is identified, it should be accompanied with a linked risk (it may not be available, or it may not meet specifications for example).

Just because the project manager issues a Work Package to a Third Party does NOT make the products inside the work page ‘external’. You take ALL the products types from the PBS – APART FROM THE INTERMEDIATE COLLECTIVE (Rhomboid) Products – and transfer them to the Product Flow Diagram (PFD).

The PFD shows “the sequence of creation of the products”, and is drawn with arrows showing sequence and dependencies. Refer to the jpg diagram below as an example:

For more information CLICK HERE