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Product Planning in PRINCE2 

 February 27, 2023

By  Dave Litten

Product Planning in PRINCE2

Product Planning – a PRINCE2 Master class

Probably the most asked question when product planning is to how to get the right level of detail.  Obviously this will depend upon the nature of the project and the environment within which it is to be run.  Complexity and risky projects will require more details and more control.

PRINCE2 helps here, by encouraging you to start with product planning, identifying the products and outcomes first before attempting to identify the activities needed to create them.

It is important to realize that while you are product planning (which are normally tangible), some products will be outcomes such as a change in culture, but they are still products nevertheless.

Once product planning is completed, the project manager will then focus on identifying the activities required to create the products, and this ‘reverse engineering’ is very powerful technique.

A product is normally described as a noun or outcome whereas an activity is described by a noun and a verb.  Imagine the problem if you started planning by creating tasks or activities –a task such as ‘create document’ begs the question; what is the purpose of the document and what format should it take?

Such ambiguity can lead to problems later.

Starting with the product planning technique will resolve the above problem, mainly by creating a product description for each product.  But it’s all you have is the sequence of activities, and you are not yet clear about what they are, and how can you expect in a logical sequence?

This is why product planning must have happened first, and only then should you consider activity planning.  This will give birth to a much more structured and logical plan (which ultimately will be some form of document).

Now the first step in product planning is to create a Product Breakdown Structure, and this in and of itself, will help you and your team to brainstorm all the products that are needed. However, I want to focus on the next step in particular – creating the Product Flow Diagram.

Typically, the products will be deliverables such as ‘designed sales page  as an example, but what about external products.  These are products that either already exist, or those that will be created by resources external to the project (but they are still needed to complete the project).

Product Planning – the PRINCE2 Product Flow Diagram

Let us imagine that you need to update your company’s website and reconsider it using WordPress.

You get the team in a room, and start to draw up (say on a whiteboard), the products and their dependencies.

I would normally brainstorm products using post-it notes, and first consider in product planning, which products must be created one after the other, and which products can be created in parallel.

Performing a visual quality check, I would ask:

  • Are the dependencies and what consequences for each product correct?
  • Has each product been shown at its earliest point of creation?
  • Does each product have the correct predecessors?
  • Have I included external products if required?
  • Performing ‘backward pass’ checks.

Because I normally read from left to right, the team and I would normally plan the products from left to right.  However, some folks would prefer to start the end product and work backwards.  There is nothing wrong with this, but assuming that you too have started left to right, performing a backward pass next is a powerful technique in product planning.

The first step here is to start at the end product and work backwards.  Here is a suggested sequence of questions you need to ask to improve and correct your first pass product flow diagram:

  • Starting with your end product, are the arrows coming into that product, emanating from a correct product, or could the end product be created without them?
  • For the end product, do you need any other products to be created other than the ones with arrows leading into it?  If so, this may be a missing product. Ask yourself “is there anything else?”
  • You may discover that links are missing, or that links are redundant.
  • Ask yourself if there are any external products that need to be created, are they included, and is the best way or should they be created in-house?
  • Having resolved the end product, I would work backwards starting at the products that first feed into the end product and asking myself the same questions until I arrived back at the first product.

Suppose my second attempt at my product flow diagram after asking myself the above questions resulted in:

Say I found another five products that were missing from my first attempt, and I had to re- draw the diagram with a better layout.

But it is quite normal and another good reason why you should create these diagrams on either the Whiteboard or by using post-it notes on a flip chart or similar.

Let us use the above diagram to explain some of my thinking, and how it helped me to create a more complete and logical product flow diagram.

I realized that the website needed two extra products, first to design the structure and then the ‘look and feel’, so I added an extra product and re-linked into a logical sequence.

I also realized that the marketing campaign could not start until I had the structure in place, so I added that dependency.

I also removed a redundant link from the old Designed website product to the Website live product.

Now that I had separated out the website design from its structure, I realized another external product was needed – the graphics for my site logo being done by a local design company.

I also realized that I was not going to design ALL the website structure, I needed to use an existing WordPress Theme and a WordPress skin first, and use this as the basis to design the structure. I added this an another external product.

In a similar way, remembered that I was going to get trained based upon which template I chose, so another external was added.

Most important of all, I needed my new site to attract many new visitors and needed to create a new ‘word smithed’ sales/front page, and that had an impact on the scope of the WordPress training.

Okay, I think you have got the drift, the above explanations are just an example of how doing a forward and then backward pass will unearth any missing or illogical aspects of your Product Flow Diagram.

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Dave Litten


Dave spent 25+ years as a senior project manager for UK and USA multinationals and has deep experience in project management. He now develops a wide range of Project Management Masterclasses, under the Projex Academy brand name. In addition, David runs project management training seminars across the world, and is a prolific writer on the many topics of project management.

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