PRINCE2 Project Product Description
Now let’s move on to the project product description it’s important you get a flavor of the structure here what we’re talking about at the highest level, is the project brief and within the project brief we have the outline business case and we have the project product description plus the project approach.
So here we’re talking about the project product description.
Now this is a special form of product description defining exactly what the project must deliver in order to gain acceptance from the customer.
As I’ve repeated here it’s used to gain acceptance from the user regarding the project scope and requirements and to define the customers quality expectations.
Acceptance criteria is the method used to carry out acceptance and the individuals who have responsibilities for these aspects, in any PRINCE2 project you see it’s created here initially in the starting up a project process.
But when we enter into the initiation stage and use the initiating of project process, then when it comes to creating the project plan the project product description may again be updated or modified.
Once the PID is signed off and the project enters into the delivery stages at the end of each stage the project product description should be checked to make sure it’s up to date accurate and relevant it’s highly likely that as the project goes through its delivery stages that some small changes may occur to the customers quality expectations.
For example or as changes occur within the project quite naturally the acceptance criteria needs to be updated to encompass and include the modified acceptance criteria as a result of such changes.
Let’s then look at the contents of the PRINCE2 project product description:
The title the name of the project the purpose of the project product and what we mean by that is the project product purpose when it enters operational life and it will also include who will use it.
For example the operational group responsible composition is a description of the project’s major products to be delivered this will often be detailed utilizing PRINCE2’s project based planning technique where a fairly high level product breakdown structure could be used to define and describe the composition of the products.
This will be covered in the plans theme
Derivation. the source products in which this product is derived it may for example be a requirements document or it could be as I mentioned earlier coming from the project mandate itself or a feasibility report from a feasibility study.
Next up the development skills required in order to develop the product or if it isn’t yet clearly understood what these skills need to be then the area from which they had come from.
This could be a department or group internal to your company or to an external third party if appropriate so as as a minimum this should point to who will supply the specialist development team and what that team should consist of.
You may augment this to include not two skills but knowledge and experience for example the customers quality expectation a description of the quality expected of the project’s product and any standards and processes needed in order to achieve that quality.
It would be helpful whenever possible to prioritize such quality expectations as there are bound to be trade-offs and the customers quality expectations will also give clues to the best project approach to be chosen.
The acceptance criteria is a prioritized list of criteria that the project’s product must meet in order to be acceptable to the customer or users these should always be measurable definition of the attributes.
In other words, going back to the previous slide customers quality expectations may be fairly broad in the way they’re stated.
For example easy to use but where it comes to acceptance criteria each aspect should be measurable because after all if you can’t measure it then that will lead to discussions, arguments, and disagreements when it comes to accepting the end product at the end of the project.
And this could cause overrun delays and so on and so forth.
Project level quality tolerances these specify any tolerances around the acceptance criteria.
Suppose one of the acceptance criterion might be speed in some way, perhaps speed of response of some system in which case such tolerances in terms of speed or time should be added here plus and minus so many milliseconds.
As an example the acceptance method this of course is the means by which acceptance will be confirmed and it could be just about anything at its simplest just a visual inspection.
If it is more complex, this might be a range of acceptance testing possibly covering many weeks or months.
The acceptance responsibilities this will define who’s responsible for confirming acceptance one would expect the senior user role on the project board to be a key player in terms of defining exactly who is responsible for acceptance.
It may be themselves of course, so the project product description created in starting up a project and refined in initiating a project when creating the project and and checked at stage boundaries and finally used closing a project as part of project delivery.
Verification is the acceptance method and the acceptance criteria and the acceptance responsibilities come together at the end of the project hopefully to conclude that yes, the project has delivered what was expected and thus the project can be successfully closed.
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