PRINCE2 Management Products
While it is true that PRINCE2 is a documentation method, you will of course need to understand topics such as risk management for example. It is important however that you really need to know about these “documents” to be successful in the PRINCE2 exams.
PRINCE2 takes a product based approach to planning, but that product emphasis extends further than just planning as the first thing to appreciate about products, what people will produce, is that there are two sorts: specialist and management.
PRINCE2 specialist products
Specialist products are primarily what the teams are building on a project and may include things such as designed roaring, a computer program, or brick wall and a strategy report. You may think of them as “technical” but in PRINCE2 the word it is “specialist”.
PRINCE2 management products
These are things being used to manage the project. Management products includes things like the project plan, the project brief, the daily log and the end project report.
The management products are easy to reference as they are all listed in appendix a of the official PRINCE2 Manual.
Many management products turn out to be documents, I’ll be at a lecture on it ones most of the time. However, keep in mind that a product within a particular project does not necessarily have to be a document.
As an example here, the highlight report is called such rather than the highlight document. The reason is that in a more informal project, much of the reporting may be verbal and not written down at all.
The decision on what must be written down, tailoring the PRINCE2 approach if you will, is decided during initiation and recorded within the communications management strategy. Other management products may be delivered in the form of emails and presentations at meetings.
The three categories of PRINCE2 Management Product
The management products are grouped within three categories according to whether the products are baselined products, records all reports.
PRINCE2 baseline products
The word baseline is a configuration management/version control term. It follows that baselined products are those for which you want to keep track of versions, perhaps to look back at an earlier version.
The baseline products are those which are highly likely to change or are certain to. It is because of the changes that you may want to look at an earlier version.
PRINCE2 records
Records are kept up to date all the time and so are not version controlled.
An example is the quality register which contains a list of quality actions to be taken within a stage. When and action is performed such as a test of a specialist product, then the appropriate entry is signed off in the quality register with the date that the test was done. It therefore acts as a sort of checklists and you do not need to version control the register because the entries are dated anyway.
PRINCE2 reports
A report is a snapshot of a particular point in time and will not be changed. If the team manager sends a checkpoint report to the project manager to set down the progress that has been made during, say, the past week, then that report is dated for that point in time.
The team manager will not alter the report stream months later and send in a revised version.
Reports are fairly quick to produce and that’s another reason why normally you don’t want to have versions and so treat the reports as baselined products.
A checkpoint report shouldn’t take the team manager much more than about 45 minutes to put together, and probably rather less, so it is not going to go through several versions in that time.
Reports are easy to spot in PRINCE2 because apart from one, they all have the word report in their title. The exception is called the product status account, for which the title does not include the word report so be careful to remember that it is indeed a report.
PRINCE2 management product anomalies
Configuration item records
The Manual is strange for configuration item records in terms of showing who is responsible for what, but this probably is just down too poor writing.
In initiation, project support creates the configuration item records, but on a stage boundary, apparently it is down to the project manager. The process involved depends on the products being created (of management or specialist) and the plan level (project or stage).
Lessons reports
Lessons reports can be created at end stage and also at the end of the project.
However, there is also a lessons report entry in the highlight report so that a significant lessons can be passed back into the organization without delay to benefit other projects immediately and without waiting for the end of the stage.
PRINCE2 management products in the practitioner exam
For the practitioner exam, predictably, you will need to be especially clear on the contents of the individual management products, but then you have the advantage of being able to look things up in the PRINCE2 Manual.
Remember that for the foundation exam, although you won’t need so much detail on management products, it all has to be in your head for this closed book exam.
The PRINCE2 definition of a product
When revising for either of the PRINCE2 exams, make sure you are familiar with the following aspects:
Make sure that for each product you know what it actually is and what it is used for. It can be easy to miss out on some information or not be able to remember in the first place. An example here is the project approach – you need to know exactly what it is and what the products it appears in are.
To remind you if you’re unsure, the project approach sets down anything affecting the nature of the final deliverable of the project and also things accepting how the project is to be run and managed.
The project approach forms part of the project brief in Startup, but then in initiation it goes on to be part of the project initiation documentation (PID), where it is then maintained throughout the project.
The use of the project approach to record things are affecting how the project will be run is not apparent from Appendix A of the official PRINCE2 Manual.
Where the PRINCE2 management products are created and when they are used
You will need to know where each product is created in terms of the processes and activities. For the foundation exam you need to know the processes as a minimum. As an example the issue register is created in the process initiating a project and, within that, in the activity “prepare the configuration management strategy”.
Make sure that you know where the product is used and where it is updated. In particular, watch out for the process of managing a stage boundary, because a lot of things can be updated there.
Some of the named activities can be misleading. An example is “update the project plan” where the activity actually involves updating a considerably wider range of products than just the plan. Check it out for yourself and see.
Who is responsible for the PRINCE2 management products?
Be sure that you know who creates each product, who updates it, and who needs to look at it.
Be careful about the business case as you may think that the project manager produces the business case because it forms part of the project brief and then becomes part of the PID.
While it is true that the project manager produces the detailed business case for the PID, but in Start-up the Manual says that the executive produces it. In the real world, this is rather unlikely!
The use of PRINCE2 management products for the practitioner exam
For the practitioner exam, you should also ensure that you understand each section of each management product. As part of your revision, check out the Headings of the “composition” section of each product in appendix A of the official PRINCE2 Manual.
Each heading has a brief explanation against it, and most of them are pretty clear, however, do not make the mistake of thinking that because the explanations are there, you don’t need to put much effort into going through them first.
Remember that in the practitioner exam, you will be under time pressure and you simply won’t have the time to start reading lots of the Manual to find out what the products are, so you need to know beforehand. The point here is that you need to refer to the Manual quickly to confirm something, but will not have the time to start finding things out.
Management products come into the practitioner exam in a number of different ways, all leading familiarity with those products.
You may be given an example of a product that has errors in it which you will need to be able to spot quickly and pick the right replacement option in order to correct it.
It may be, in a matching question that you are given different items of information a master say which product they belonged to.
As you can see it makes sense to already have a good level of familiarity with the detail of the products involved.
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