Revising the Plans Theme
Have a look at the checklists in this section as you plan your revision. If you know something well, tick it off the list. If you feel unsure of the point, don’t tick it – yet – but put it on your revision list to go through again. The checklists cover what’s in the official exam syllabus for each exam, but also some other key points that you need to have clear.
Revision checklist – Foundation
This list covers the official syllabus for the Foundation exam, but then adds some other points essential to your understanding of planning. Don’t tick off an item unless you feel sure that you know it. The things you need to look at are:
The purpose statement for the theme – as set out in the opening section of the Plans chapter in the PRINCE2 manual
Levels of plan – Project, Stage and Team Plans, and who’s responsible for each (Project Manager for the first two, Team Manager for the Team Plan)
The use of the plan levels by the different management levels with appropriate information – for example, the Project Board doesn’t need to see or approve the fine detail of a Team Plan
The nature of an Exception Plan – and when one is and isn’t needed
Types of plan – product, activity, resource, financial (although PRINCE2 offers no significant help on the last of these)
When plans are produced – including Stage Plans, generally, being produced at the end of the previous stage
The fit of plans in the method and in support of the PRINCE2 principle ‘focus on products’ – starting with the Project Product Description (PPD)
The fit of plans in support of other principles – ‘manage by stages’ with the use of Stage Plans, and ‘manage by exception’ with tolerances set on plans and the use of Exception Plans when needed
The (alleged) steps of product-based planning – PPD, Product Breakdown Structure (PBS), Product Descriptions, Product Flow Diagram (PFD)
The (alleged) steps in planning [Manual Figure 7.2]
Following on from the last point, that the activity ‘Analyse the risks’ runs in parallel to most of the other planning activities
What a product is and isn’t – there’s more on this in the next main section of this chapter, with a quick quiz to check your understanding
The two types of product – management and specialist
The three sub-types of management product – baseline products, records and reports, and what those names mean
The technique of planning with products first (product-based or product-led planning) and what the diagrams are about – PBS and Product Flow
Revision checklist – Practitioner
Make sure that you’re still up to speed with the areas on the Foundation checklist, then check this list out for additional Practitioner revision points:
Product Flow Diagram (PFD) – that you can draw one and are confident enough with the technique that you could spot errors in a faulty one
Product Breakdown Structure (PBS) – that you can draw one and, again, are confident enough with the technique that you could spot errors in a faulty one
The difference between a PFD and a PBS, and how the diagrams give entirely different views of the products
Product Descriptions – how they are used, when (in terms of the processes and activities), and what each of the sections on a Product Description is about
In the Practitioner exam, you’ll get a whole section of the paper on the Plans theme, so don’t be taken in by the apparently limited content of the exam syllabus in this area. You need to have a good grasp of product planning to be able to answer the exam questions. The checklist above mentions your ability to draw diagrams, and as a first reaction you may think that this is wrong, because in a multiple-choice format clearly you can’t be asked to do any drawing. However, the skill is still needed, because you need to be able to interpret any diagrams given to you in the exam, perhaps to spot errors in faulty ones and to suggest correct substitute parts for diagrams to replace faulty elements.