PLANNING A PROJECT

1. WELL-DEFINED GOALS
One of the most obvious–and most important– steps of a
project plan is defining your project goals. When you set your
goals before work begins, you, your client, and your team are
all on the same page and future misunderstandings can be
avoided. Good goals are realistic, clear, and measurable.

•Realistic– Can we accomplish this goal with the allotted time

and resources available to us?
•Clear– Do we know exactly what is being asked of us? Does
everyone understand?
•Measurable– Are there quantifiable indicators with which we
can judge each goal?
When you set good goals, the project team has a reliable standard to
evaluate the progress of their contributions.

No time needs to be wasted on activities that don’t support the goals.

If any disagreements about project deliverables arise along the way,
you can reiterate the agreed-upon goals to your client, which
helps prevent scope creep.

Project wrap-up is much simpler when you set good goals in the
beginning; it’s easy to determine whether you’ve met those goals and
identify areas for improvement. None of that is possible without taking
time for project planning.
 2. RESOURCE PLANNING
Your team has finite resources to
work with, and the success of your
project depends on your operating
within the limits of those resources.
The problems created by a lack of
resource planning are fairly obvious:
if you run out of money, time, or
personnel before the project is
complete, your project is going to
fail!
Good resource planning includes:
•Financial resource planning– Do we have the money to complete
the project as currently envisioned?
•Human resource planning– Do I have enough people to meet all
our goals in the amount of time given? Do my team members have
the project management skills required? Is anyone on the team
taking significant time off?
•Physical resource planning– Do we have the office space,
computers, and other equipment required to complete this project?
•Vendor resource planning– Will our current vendor relationships
sufficiently meet the needs of this project?
•Resource conflict planning– What else is going on in our
organization that could interfere with our project? How can I mitigate
those conflicts?
 3. TASK PLANNING

• Task management is so important that many people (mistakenly) think of project

management solely in terms of managing tasks. While there’s certainly more to project
planning than outlining your tasks, you must take task planning seriously.

• Take a look at your goals and list all the tasks you believe are necessary to achieve those
goals. Include sub-tasks if needed, and be prepared to come back and revise this list
later. Once you have a comprehensive list of tasks, identify priorities and project
dependencies among them. This will come in handy when it’s time to start scheduling.
4. RISK IDENTIFICATION
Check with your team and other project
stakeholders about risks to consider. Areas of risk
include:

It would be nice if we could all go about our •project scope,

•resources (personnel, financial, and physical),
work without considering the bad things that
•project delays,
might happen. That’s not totally possible, but •failures of technology
if you make risk identification part of your •communication.
project planning process, you’ll be
You can’t prevent every bad thing from happening, but
prepared before a crisis presents itself, and preparing for some of the most likely scenarios can
then it’s not as much of a crisis. mean the difference between success and failure.
5. Communication
q One area of project planning that’s easy to overlook is communication in project
management. What tools are you going to use? Email, text messaging, a chat service, or
some combination of things? Make sure everyone on the team understands what’s
expected and use project collaboration tools to communicate between teams.

q The method of communication is important, but don’t neglect the content! Make sure
to set clear expectations and guidelines on the kinds of information that need to be
communicated. It doesn’t hurt to set standards for the tone and level of formality
expected among team members, and with clients and stakeholders. As they say,
“there’s no such thing as overcommunication.”
6. SCHEDULING
ü A project schedule contains more than your average weekly planner notes.
Project scheduling involves creating a project charter, scope document, these
days usually a digital document, that details the project timeline and the
organizational resources required to complete each task. The purpose of the
project schedule is to communicate critical information to the team, so it must be
both comprehensive and easy to understand.

ü If you take time during project planning to create a good schedule, use a
proper project scheduling tool that helps your project go much more smoothly.
Team members can look to the schedule as a resource and guide, which gives
individuals autonomy while keeping everyone accountable to the same goals.
7. QUALITY CONTROL
Quality control is all about metrics, and it’s important to have
the right metrics in place from the beginning of your project.
Your quality control metrics go far beyond the basic details
outlined in your project goals. Methods of quality control
planning include:

•cost-benefit analysis,
•benchmarking,
•design of experiments (DOE), and
•cost of quality (COQ)