The Importance of Planning Your Projects
A detailed project plan is critical in ensuring the success of your project. Or is it?
It very much depends what you put in it. You’ve heard the saying “rubbish in, rubbish out”, well it’s the same for your project plan.
Before you start you need to know the purpose of your project, the objectives, any milestones and the deliverables or outcomes that are required.
So, first things first – get your project team involved! You will have a more motivated team working on the implementation of your project if you involve them in the planning stage.
1. Complete a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). Know all the tasks and subtasks required to achieve the objectives of your project. Sort these tasks into workpackages or streams of work. This stage is often missed when using planning software, but can ensure that all tasks are included.
2. Identify the relationships between your tasks using a precedence diagram model or flow chart. Keep it simple at this stage, simple boxes and lines connecting them are all that is required. There should be no tasks that are standing alone without any connections to at the least the start & finish!
3. Now it’s time to allocate your team and any other stakeholders to the tasks. Ask your team to estimate the durations for their tasks, remembering that if a task takes 1 person 2 days, then it may take the same task with 2 people 1 day to complete, but it might vary depending on skill levels of available resource.
4. Now it’s time to put a time line together based on the teams’ availability and the duration of the tasks. Using your precedence diagram model move the tasks starting from your start date towards the end date.
5. Finally, allocate your budget to your tasks. How much does each task cost to complete? Every task should have an allocation as it will be completed by 1 or more people and they have a cost. Your finance or HR department should be able to provide you with this.
Now you have a detailed project plan from which you can start to implement your project. There are many specific software tools available to help you with this stage of the project. Be sure to get one that is consistent with any other software within your organisation, and take advice from your IT department if necessary.
The same principles apply to project planning whether your project is a family holiday or a multi-million pound construction project.
Here's another colourful example of part of a plan from a recent training course. (We use post-its and flipchart paper!)
