How do you initiate and justify your project plan?

To initiate and justify a project plan, start by clearly identifying the project purpose and scope. Define the problem or opportunity being addressed, set the goals, and establish boundaries. Use tools like a project charter or business case to outline the project's value and demonstrate its alignment with stakeholders' objectives. This ensures a shared understanding and helps secure approval for the project.

Defining and clarifying the project scope will help to set boundaries, identify deliverables, without overworking yourself or delaying deadlines. Hopefully this is a team effort to ensure the project's goals and limitations are in sync with your internal team, clients, stakeholders, etc. An easy way to ensure all of your projects identify scope and purpose, a project scope management template may be a good idea. In my experience, templates can save me hours and hours of work (and un-paid overtime). Spending some time crafting your template now may be extremely helpful later on!

Functional decomposition is a method in project management that involves breaking down a project into smaller, more manageable components or functions. Identify High-Level Deliverables: Begin by identifying the main project deliverables, such as the end product or major milestones. Break Down High-Level Deliverables: Divide each high-level deliverable into smaller, more specific sub-deliverables. Continue Decomposition: Keep breaking down sub-deliverables into smaller parts until you reach a level where they can be easily assigned. Define Dependencies: Identify dependencies between sub-deliverables to understand the sequence of work and resource allocation. Assign Responsibility: Clearly assign responsibility for each sub-deliverable.

Developing the project schedule and budget involves several key steps: 1. Define project scope 2. Break down the project into activities 3. Determine activity dependencies 4. Estimate activity durations 5. Allocate resources 6. Develop the project schedule 7. Estimate costs 8. Develop the project budget 9. Review and refine 10. Monitor and control By following these steps, project managers can effectively develop a project schedule and budget that aligns with the project's objectives, resources, and constraints.

Think of all aspects and brainstorm with team/stakeholders for the potential risks, then prioritize and rank them as per probability of risk. Document risks and treat them as living document through-out the project. This helps to keep a track and stay updated for identified risks and proposed action plans to deal with those risks.

Taking all these steps is critical in the Project Plan but the most important thing to consider is reality, You can do all this but things go beyond your control. One important thing to do is to be ready to adapt our plans to the realities in the field, To be flexible to make important changes when it is necessary, and to communicate these changes with all the stakeholders. These changes should be Documented as it will help future project plans.

I've found it a helpful to have a paragraph on project justification that succintly answers the 3 questions: Why your project is necessary and what it will do? What are the benefits will the project have? What are the positive effects that it will have? Also important: What new opportunities could the project open up for the team, client, stakeholder, etc.? This can also be set up in a template and slightly tailored to the different project it is for.