Knowing the Three Categories of Management Product

If you look at Appendix A of the PRINCE2 manual, you’ll see that the management products are defined and explained in turn and in alphabetical order. On the first page of the appendix, you’ll find them listed in a different order, though, and grouped in three categories according to whether the products are baseline products, records or reports.

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’s because of the changes that you may want to look at an earlier version.

Records

Records are kept up to date all the time and so aren’t version controlled. An example is the Quality Register. The Quality Register contains a list of quality actions to be taken in a stage. When an 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 the test was done; it acts as a sort of checklist. You don’t need to version control the register, because the entries are dated anyway.

Reports

A report is a snapshot at a particular point in time and won’t be changed. If a Team Manager sends a Checkpoint Report to the Project Manager to set down the progress that’s been made in the past week, then that report is dated for that point in time. The Team Manager won’t alter the report three months later and send in a revised version.

Reports are fairly quick to produce; that’s another reason why, normally, you don’t want to have versions and so treat the reports as baseline 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 isn’t 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 the Product Status Account, for which the title doesn’t include the word ‘report’ – so be careful to remember that it is a report.