Plan

The project plan provides a statement of how and when a projects time cost scope and quality
targets are to be achieved.
It identifies the major product activities and resources required for the project.
The project plans also:
Provide business case with planned costs and timescales
Identifies major control point such as management stages and milestones
The project plan is used by the project board as a baselined against which to monitor
progress stage by stage.
Three level of plan
It is often impossible to plan an entire project from the start as you can only accurately plan in
detail a short time in advance. This is called planning horizontal ie as far ahead as you can
see.
There are three levels of plans:

The project plan

It is used at the direction level and is therefore used by the project board. It is created during
the initiating a project process and is high level plan for the whole project. It will show the
major product of the project when they will be delivered and the associated cost. It is a major
control of the projet board. The project plan is updated by the project manager during the
project.
The stage plan is used at the management level. It is created for each stage and used by the
project manager on the day to day basis. It is more detailed than the project plan and just
focused on one stage.
Team plan are used at the delivering level. They are created and used by the team managers
in managing product delivery process. The focus is to plan the work that is assigned to the
team manager in work packages.

The Path to planning

The prince2 planning step and design the plan

Product based planning

The benefits of product based planning are:

1. Clearly identifying and documenting the plans products and interdependencies
2. Clearly showing what the project involves, this avoid setting wrong expectation
3. Involving users in supplying products requirements and thus increasing their support
4. Improving communications as it provides a simple overview of what needs to be done
and makes it much easier to get feedback
5. Clarify what is in and out of the scope this helps to avoid scope creep
6. And finally it is easier to gain a clear agreement on what needs to be produced.

The main headings that should be included in a project Description are:

The Exception Plan- Out of tolerance plan

This plan is used to recover from the effect of tolerance deviation.for instance if during a
stage the project manager is forecast to go out of tolerance on cost by 15% then they most
warn the projet board about the deviation. The project board will most likely ask for an
updated plan to complete the current stage and this plan is replacew by the current stage plan.
So the project manager will create an exception plan and if approved by the project board will
repalace the current stage plan to allow the project manager to complete the current stage.