PROJECT PLANNING

The project planning phase of project management is where a project manager builds the project

roadmap, including the project plan, project scope, project schedule, project constraints, work

breakdown structure, and risk analysis.

The project planning phase serves as a roadmap and acts as a control tool throughout the project.

Project planning provides guidance by answering questions like:

 What product(s) or service(s) will we deliver?

 How much will the project cost?

 How can we meet the needs of our stakeholders?

 How will progress be measured?

IMPORTANCE OF PROJECT PLANNING

 Planning identifies and reduces potential risks

Risk is always lurking in the background, whether at a micro or macro level. What may seem

like a minor risk to a task could pose a larger threat later during project execution. Proper

planning allows teams to ensure that risks can be mitigated against and that smaller tasks roll-up

into milestones that meet with the larger goals of the project, reducing potential risks.

 Reducing project failure rates

It's where the scope of the project is laid out, where the timeline, costs, deliverables and the

details are ironed out. This is where expectations are set and assumptions are identified. Without

this vital step, it is almost certain things will fall through the cracks and a project team is bound

to miss crucial details, deadlines and eventually deliverables.

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  Project planning plays an essential role in helping guide stakeholders, sponsors, teams,

and the project manager through other project phases. It provides a shared vision for what

the project will accomplish – this common understanding can bind the team together in

completing actions that satisfy the project’s goals.

 It gives clarity on the responsibilities of team members and other organizations in

contributing to the goals of the project.

 It organizes the work of the project and can be used to prevent extraneous work from

crowding out legitimate project activities.

 It can be a very powerful communication mechanism, supplementing verbal interactions.

This is an important written reference for the team, and can also be used with other

stakeholders.

 Planning is needed to identify desired goals

Project Planning Terms

Deliverable: The results of a project, such as a product, service, report, etc.

Stakeholder: Anyone with a vested interest in the project - project manager, project sponsor,

team members, customers, etc.

Tasks: Small jobs that lead to the final deliverable.

Milestone: The end of one project phase, and the beginning of the next.

Resources: Anything you need to complete the project, such as personnel, supplies, materials,

tools, people and more.

Budget: Estimate of total cost related to completing a project.

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Tracking & Monitoring: Collecting project data, and making sure it reflects the results you

planned for.

Project Planning Steps

1. Outline the Business Case

If you have a project, there’s a reason for it - that’s your business case. The business case

outlines reasons why the project is being initiated, its benefits and the return on investment. If

there’s a problem that is being solved, then that problem is outlined here. The business case will

be presented to those who make decisions at your organization, explaining what has to be done,

and how, along with a feasibility study to assess the practicality of the project. If approved, you

have a project.

2. Meet with Key Stakeholders

Every project has stakeholders, those who have a vested interest in the project. From the ones

who profit from it, to the project team members who are responsible for its success. Therefore,

any project manager must identify who these key stakeholders are during the project planning

process, from customers to regulators. Meeting with them is crucial to get a better picture of

what the project management plan should include and what is expected from the final

deliverable.

3. Define Project Scope

It refers to the work required to accomplish the project objectives and generate the required

deliverables. The project scope should be defined and organized by a work breakdown structure

(WBS). Therefore, the project scope includes what you must do in the project (deliverables, sub

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deliverables, work packages, action items), but also what is nonessential. The latter is important

for the project plan, because knowing what isn’t high priority helps to avoid scope creep; that is,

using valuable resources for something that isn’t key to your project’s success.

4. Assemble a Project Team

You’ll need a capable project team to help you create your project plan and execute it

successfully. It’s advisable to gather a diverse group of experienced professionals to build a

multi-disciplinary team that sees your project management plan from different perspectives.

5. Determine a Project Budget

Once you define your project scope, you’ll have a task list that must be completed to deliver your

project successfully. To do so, you’ll need resources such as equipment, materials, human

capital, and of course, money. Your project budget will pay for all this. The first step to create a

project budget is to estimate the costs associated with each task. Once you have those estimated

costs, you can establish a cost baseline, which is the base for your project budget.

6. Set Project Goals & Objectives

Goals and objectives are different things when it comes to planning a project. Goals are the

results you want to achieve, and are usually broad. Objectives, on the other hand, are more

specific; measurable actions that must be taken to reach your goal. When creating a project plan,

the goals and objectives naturally spring from the business case, but in this stage, you go into

further detail. In a sense, you’re fine-tuning the goals set forth in the business case and creating

tasks that are clearly defined. These goals and objectives are collected in a project charter, which

you’ll use throughout the project life cycle.

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 7. Outline Project Deliverables

A project can have numerous deliverables. A deliverable can be a good, service or result that is

needed to complete a task, process, phase, subproject or project. For example, the final

deliverable is the reason for the project, and once this deliverable is produced, the project is

completed. As defined in the project scope, a project consists of subprojects, phases, work

packages, activities and tasks, and each of these components can have a deliverable. The first

thing to do is determine what the final deliverable is, and how you will know that the quality

meets your stakeholder’s expectations. As for the other deliverables in the project, they must also

be identified and someone on the team must be accountable for their successful completion.

8. Create a Project Schedule

The project schedule is what everything hangs on. From your tasks to your budget, it’s all

defined by time. Schedules are made up by collecting all the tasks needed to reach your final

deliverable, and setting them on a project timeline that ends at your deadline. This can make for

an unruly job ahead, which is why schedules are broken into phases, indicated by milestones,

which mark the end of one project phase and the beginning of the next.

9. Assign Tasks to Your Team Members

The plan is set, but it still exists in the abstract until you take the tasks on your schedule and

begin assigning them out to your team members. Their roles and responsibilities must be clearly

defined, so they know what to do. Then, when you assign them tasks from your plan, they should

be clear, with directions and any related documentation they will need to execute the tasks.

10. Do a Risk Analysis

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Every project has some level of risk. There are several types of risk such as scope risk, technical

risks and schedule risk, among others. Even if your project plan is thorough, internal and external

factors can impact your project’s time, cost and scope (triple constraint). Therefore, you need to

regard your planning as flexible. There are many ways to prepare for risk, such as developing a

change management plan, but for now, the most important thing to do is to track your progress

throughout the execution phase by using project status reports and/or project planning software

to monitor risk.

11. Create your Project Plan

As discussed above, a project management plan is a document that’s made of several elements.

Before we get into a detailed explanation of each of them, it’s important to understand that you

should include them all to have a solid project plan. The components that you’ll need might vary

depending on your project, but in general terms, you’ll need these main documents to create your

project management plan:

 Project charter, Project schedule, Project budget, Project scope statement, Risk

management plan, Change management plan, Cost management plan, Resource

management plan and Stakeholder management plan

12. Report Your Progress

Your ultimate goal is to ensure a successful project for your stakeholders. They’re invested, and

will not be satisfied twiddling their thumbs without looking at project status reports to track

progress. By constructing a work breakdown structure (WBS) during the project planning phase

you can break down the project for them so that they understand how your project plan will be

executed. Keeping stakeholders informed is important to manage their expectations and ensure

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that they’re satisfied. Having regular planning meetings where you present progress reports are a

great way to show them that everything is moving forward as planned and to field any questions

or concerns, they might have. Your stakeholder management plan will specify how you’ll engage

stakeholders in the project.

What Is the Purpose of a Project Management Plan?

The purpose of a project management plan is to serve as a guide for the execution and

control phases. The project plan provides all the information necessary for the execution phases

such as the project’s goals, objectives, scope of work, milestones, risks and resources. Then, this

information helps project managers monitor and control the progress of the project.

We plan at the beginning to save time later. A good project plan means that you don’t

have to worry about whether the project participants are going to be available on the right dates -

because you’ve planned for them to be. You don’t have to worry about how to pay those invoices

- you’ve planned your financial process. You don’t have to worry about whether everyone agrees

on what a quality outcome looks like - you’ve already planned what quality measures you are

going to use.

A good project plan sets out the processes that everyone is expected to follow, so it

avoids a lot of headaches later. For example, if you specify that estimates are going to be worked

out by subject matter experts based on their judgement, and that’s approved, later no one can

complain that they wanted you to use a different estimating technique. They’ve known the deal

since the start.

Project plans are also really helpful for monitoring progress. You can go back to them

and check what you said you were going to do and how, comparing it to what you are actually

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doing. This gives you a good reality check and enables you to change course if you need to,

bringing the project back on track.

The Elements of a Project Plan

The project planning process already discussed only scratches the surface of what is a deep well

of practices created to control your project. They start with dialogue - speaking to stakeholders,

teams, et al.

The deliverable for your planning phase is a document called the project plan. A Guide to the

Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) – Fifth Edition says that the project

plan is made up of lots of subsidiary plans. These include:

 A project scope statement to define all the tasks and deliverables that are needed to

complete the project

 A risk management plan for dealing with project risk including the processes for logging

and tracking risks

 A change management plan to manage any changes that will be made to the project plan

 A cost management plan for managing costs and the budgeting elements of the project

including any procurements or supplier engagements you might have

 A resource management plan for managing the material resources such as equipment and

the human resources on the team both in terms of availability and skills

 A stakeholder management plan setting out who is going to receive messages about the

project, when and in what format

 A quality plan that specifies the quality targets for the project.

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TOOLS FOR PROJECT PLANNING

1. Critical Path Analysis

Critical path analysis is a planning method designed to address projects with many tasks,

especially when there are those that are done at the same time and are dependent on one another.

Critical path analysis will help you determine if some tasks can run parallel, what the sequence

of tasks should be, as well as prioritize them. This takes a complicated project and finds the most

efficient path through it. That’s because critical path analysis follows a timeline that shows

where tasks are in the schedule and what must be done when.

There are three steps to critical path analysis:

i. Write out all the tasks on a project timeline

ii. Identify which of those tasks must occur at the same time

iii. Note the task dependencies

This timeline will now expose the spots in the project that need more resources and those that are

most important to keep the project on track.

2. Brainstorming

Brainstorming can be looked at as the plan before the plan. A plan for anything is a way to

organize an approach. But before that can be done well, the project must be clearly understood

and the various techniques to manage it examined. Brainstorming is a tool that uses the collective

experience and skills of the project team in order to give project managers the full picture before

they attempt to frame it in a plan.

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Therefore, brainstorming should be the first step in any planning technique. It is a creative and

lateral way of thinking that can help identify project risk and other concerns that are not

immediately apparent. There will be time to formalize a plan and add the needed structure that

every project rests on to reach a successful end. The creative nature of a brainstorming session,

and the fact that it’s contrary to typical project management methodology, make it a highly

revealing planning technique.

3. Work Breakdown Structure

Another great project planning method is the work breakdown structure (WBS), which is a way

to rank tasks in the project. Again, when a project is great in scope it helps to get a handle on it,

which is where the WBS comes in. As the name implies, the WBS breaks down the larger

project into manageable tasks. It’s like putting something in a crucible and breaking it down to

its primary elements.

Begin with the project, then start breaking it down: first into phases and then from those

milestones, into tasks. In a sense, you’re starting at the end of the project and working

backwards. The breakdown is considering the size of the task, how long it will take and who will

be responsible for that task.

Think of the WBS as a framework for planning. It provides a picture of all the pieces of the

project puzzle. With this knowledge, a project manager has the big picture and the smaller parts

that make it up, so they can now act to control the project over the course of its life cycle. From

the WBS, a statement of work will develop, as well as scheduling, budget and other resources.

4. Gantt Chart

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A Gantt chart is a stacked bar chart that contains project tasks on a vertical axis and timelines

that represent task duration on a horizontal axis. Summary elements, task dependency

relationships and milestones in the project schedule are all depicted. The Gantt chart is named

after Henry Gantt who popularized this project management chart in the early 20th century.

5. Cause and Effect Diagram

This planning technique was created by Kaoru Ishikawa, a Japanese organizational theorist, to

show the causes of an event. It is also called an Ishikawa or fishbone diagram.

It gathers and identifies issues that can develop over the course of a project. By doing so, this

planning method helps project managers figure out solutions to those problems. There is risk

inherent in every project, and planning against those risks is another way to make sure the

project proceeds as planned, without costly interruptions.

The cause-and-effect diagram has a central backbone from which bones are drawn that represent

any major factor that might impact the final outcome of the project. It can be used to take those

issues that came up during a brainstorming session and organize them.

The factors that could impact the project (or the bones that come from the backbone) could be

equipment or other resources, a legal problem, new technology, training, etc. Each of these bones

is then divided into even smaller bones to get a full view of the cause and effect they might have

on a project and its plan.

6. PERT

Program evaluation and review technique or PERT is a tool to help project managers estimate

the amount of time a project will likely take. Scheduling is one of the pillars of planning

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techniques, so you can see the importance of having a planning method like PERT to make your

schedule more accurate.

The more variables you can control, the better your outcome when estimating. But there are so

many unknowns when dealing with a project that it can feel impossible to hit your target. But

that’s just what PERT does: it manages the complex probability of a project with simple

statistical methods.

With PERT, tasks are broken down like with the WBS, but adding these activities to a Gantt

chart to link the task dependencies. This creates a map of the project’s interdependencies. Each

of the task are then given a time-to-complete estimation: optimistic (O), being the quickest it will

take to complete the task; mostly likely (M), the required deadline; or pessimistic (P), being the

most time it will take. E, being the expected time for each task, is derived by the equation: E =

(O + 4M + P)/6. The variance is found by solving this equation: V= [(P – O)/ 6] ^2. When the E

and V for every task is calculated, the total Es is an accurate time estimation for the project. The

added Vs show the expected variance.

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