The Project Planning Process

#projectmanagement #planning #projectplanning #nft #projecttemplateclub

?gn,

?Here is the transcript from my live broadcast on 'PROJECT PLANNING'. enjoy!!

?~~~~~~~~~~~~~

?Hello everyone.

?This is Sheldon St. Clair, and this is the weekly Project Management Today show. I apologize for any inconvenience. I've had some technical difficulties, which is why my show has been delayed by five minutes. So, we'll see what we can do to make up the time and finish the show as scheduled at 20 past eight.

?Today's show is about project planning and the planning process and how it can be used to plan your next event. Whether it's a sporting event, a social event, a seminar, a webinar, or a conference, you can plan all types of events.

?Today I want to show you how to plan, what to look for, and create a checklist that you can use. I'm going to give you a lot of the theory, especially in terms of planning and the different levels of planning, and at the end of this 20 minutes, I'm going to show you a case study where I run an event. So, when you're planning your next event, whether it's a Christmas market or something else, what can you do, what can you look out for.

?So, I've my watch and my trusty glasses with me because I've some reading to do. So, let's go through that. I put them on. Oh, I can see much better now. So planning is really something that the project manager or you, when you get a project, you've to do: We're planning this event. And why do you create a plan? Really to show it to the organizations, to show it to your sponsor.

?It's to show your sponsor, it's to show the people around you that you know what you're doing, that you understand the project, that you understand and appreciate the services that you're going to provide. That gives everyone a level of confidence that you know what you're doing. You're the right person for the job. And you also know what you're delivering, what activities are involved, what resources you're going to commit for the duration of the event, and what the costs are, okay?

?So that's really ‘the what’. Now as far as ‘the why’, the organization has confidence that you're competent in what you're doing. If they gave you the job and you left and never heard from you again, even though you just started doing the work, that trust isn't there. You produce something on a piece of paper, you present it to them, and they can say, okay, then this guy knows what he's doing, he's going to give us an estimate of how much money we're going to have to spend in terms of labour, in terms of resources in terms of materials and also in terms of deadlines.

?So that's the real reason. It's about providing evidence; it's about providing evidence to somebody. When you produce your event or when you produce events, what kind of documentation did you actually do?, did you actually produce? Was your project or event successfully executed, and then were there problems on the day itself or even beforehand? Did you find that you were running around like a chicken with its head cut off before the event was held?

You spent a lot of time and didn't really accomplish much. Did your team know what their roles and responsibilities were? Did you go over budget? To meet the deadline, did you work at two, three, four o'clock in the morning? If these things happen to you, it's a clear sign that your plan didn't exist, or if it did, it was a poorly crafted plan. That's why planning is so important, and that's why I'm going to give you some information today. I hope it'll help you make your next event a little less stressful.

?As for plans, how many plans do we need? That depends on how big your project is. It's safe to say that you probably need about three or four types of plans:

• At the top is the organizational plan, the strategic plan, which defines all the key products, defines the benefits, and records the key deliverables.
• At the top of the triangle, at the apex, is your business plan.
• Below that's a series of program plans, and those are basically the activities that the program manager will use to implement the business plan, the business strategy, the business objectives, the business milestones, and the business benefits. Now, that kind of program will consist of a series of milestones, it will consist of a series of deliverables, it will consist of a series of benefits.
• Now, sitting underneath your program plan, you will have a series of project plans and this is where you as a business project manager or an IT project manager will sit.

?You'll produce your own project plans, and your project plans will be about:

• what are your key products,
• what are your key deliverables,
• what activities are you going to use in order to deliver your key product or your key deliverables
• who's going to do the work?

So, your plan will consist of:

• the resources that will be needed to perform the activities.
• What is your duration, the start and the end date of each of these activities that your resources will undertake and perform, and
• what are the costs for your resources to perform the activity which delivers the milestones or products or deliverables that roll up into your program plan, that roll up into your business organizational strategy plan? And right at the bottom, right at the bottom is your actual individual plan.

?So, if you're running an event the people that you've got i.e., say, volunteers or staff, they may have a plan. Okay, the plan will be a series of checklist perhaps or items for them to do. You know, you do this, you do that, you do this and perhaps you do this afterward, that's the plan. So, many of us are in our day-to-day work are project managers.

?You may not call yourself that, but that's really what you are. So right at the bottom, in your next event, the people that are working for you on the day, have they got a list of things for them to do, and do they understand that? Have you communicated that to them? Have you sat down with them to say, well, on the day this is what you'll be doing and are they happy with that? So those are the triangle of plans that you will have.

?Now, I’m going to do a bit of reading here. This is really the planning process in terms of how to go about producing your plan. So, there are five points and, I'm kind of conscious of time, that I'll whip through. So, your plan, say you're a project manager and you're planning an event, okay. You've got to define your major products. As an example, you're doing a Christmas party, your main products will be the food as a product. Another product will be the entertainment and that could be broken down. And then the final, product will be the people who you're going to invite.

“Oh, hi Beata. I thought you'd be tired from the presentation you did in Poland today. Oh, well done. It was really, really good. I mean, I only understood about two words, but I could sense the passion in that, and the rapport you were building with the audience so, well done you.”

?So, as I say, in terms of the six steps:

1. ?the first step is you find your major products. Now,
2. ?the second one, second step is for each product, for each deliverable, what are the activities that need to be performed, that need to be done, need to be created to produce your products, to produce your deliverable. So, you've got to define that. That's point two.
3. Point three is to try and get it into a logical sequence. You do this first, you do this second, you do this third. Perhaps in order to do the third activity, you need something else to be done, okay? So, for instance, at our Christmas party, in order to buy the food, you need to understand how many people are invited to the party. So, therefore, you've got a dependency. The amount of food you buy is dependent on how many people you're inviting. Your entertainers that you're going to have that might depend on how many people are being invited as well.
4. So, you work out what your logical sequences are, and you may need to change things around.
5. And after that, when you've got your logical sequence then you can start looking at, okay, then what's my duration of each sequence that I'm performing and what's the cost associated to that?
6. And then the final point, point six, is to decide your milestones and your review points. Because if you just had a project plan of like a hundred items or a thousand items or 20 items, what are the checkpoints that you'll check to see whether the plan is working or not? And those we called milestones. I'll go into that in, in a bit more detail in terms of, okay, what kind of milestones you can have and what kind of review points you can have.

?But those are the five things that, when you're doing planning, those are six things you need.

1. ?What are my major deliverables,
2. what are the activities that are going be formed to deliver the deliverable,
3. organize it in terms of a logical sequence, a nice flow,
4. then you look at who's going to do the work and
5. how much is it going to cost and
6. how long it's going to take them.

?And then finally, what are my review points or milestones and voila, you have your project plan.

?And you can do this, as I say, for your next event. Sorry about that, I'm just looking at my extensive notes here just to make sure. Okay then so, five minutes to go.

?So, that's the theory, basically. That's the theory out of the way. Let's apply that to a case study. Let's apply that to an example.

?An example. we're going to use an event. Now, what kind of events are we talking about?

?Well, it could be a sports event, it could be an exhibition, it could be a fair, it can be a business event or corporate event, a marketing event and the planning process can be applied to all these types of events. And I suppose, in this example, we're going to produce a program plan. No, we might not have a program plan, but let's be simple. We've got five minutes left. Let's make it a project plan, okay? So, what we've got to do, we've got to define the major deliverables or the major products. So, in our example, we will have four, we'll have an administration, type of product, we'll have an operations product, we will have a marketing product and then finally, we'll have risk management as a product as well.

?So that's point one. We defined what our products will be.

?Now, what are the types of activities that we will perform to deliver each product?

?I'm just going to give an example of three for each of them.

?So, in your administration product, your administration deliverable the activities you can have could be around finance in terms of producing a finance plan, a cash flow for instance HR, and that could deal with the recruitment of staff, the recruitment of volunteers the recruitment of people to work on the day. That could be another activity. And then finally, what systems are you going to use? What systems do you need to create? What systems do you need to buy? Okay, so within the administration, those are examples of the type of activities you can use and that will be in your project plan.

?So, if you move on to the next product, which was operations. Activities you can perform to produce that product, that deliverable could be around the audience. How are we going to manage the audience on the day? Also, what are the technical and production aspects that you can use or that you can do? So, in terms of the mics, in terms of the systems, in terms of the sound, in terms of the, the cameras, in terms of the lighting, those are operational type of activities and the program for the day in terms of the speakers you're going to have or the videos you're going to show. Again, these are activities that need to be performed to create your operations deliverable.

?The third deliverable is in terms of marketing, that's always a biggie in any sort of event that you're planning. And the activities you've got there that needs to be performed is around your marketing plan. What does that look like?

?The materials you're going to create in terms of brochures, in terms of flyers, what does that look like? And in terms of sales, how are you going to capture sales for this event? Are you going to use LinkedIn, are you going to use Facebook, are you going to do videos, are you going to do ads, are you going to do any offline sales efforts, where are your sales going to come from? So, these are the type of activities that you'd have in your plan to deliver the marketing product.

?And finally, in terms of risk management. So, risk probably sits at the bottom and you're probably going to have like a risk aspect to your administration, there'll be risk associated with that. In terms of operations, there'll be risks associated with that and in marketing, risks associated with that as well. So, in terms of risks, what are we talking about? So, we're talking about in terms of compliance, whether it's food compliance, whether it's alcohol compliance, whether it's people, whether it's health and safety. So, you've got compliance aspect. And then you've got the legal part in terms of contracts. So those are activities that you need to perform, procurement, yes? And then finally, in terms of security, you probably need to hire third-party security. And again, what do those activities look like as well? And so, therefore, that's activity two.

?Now, in terms of, resources that you're going to need. In terms of resources, you need project managers, project leaders, how do you recruit your volunteers, what's your registration process, in terms of third-party security? So those are the things that you need to think about.

?And finally, you've your plan for implementation, the activities, the people involved, the duration, and the cost. How and when will you review your project to see if things are going well? You may choose to have weekly meetings. You can decide to have monthly meetings. You can say, okay, when all my staff is hired, I'm going to make this a milestone and then we'll have a checkpoint to see how things are going. Do we still have money? Have we run out of time? You can decide that after the contracts are signed is a good time to set a milestone, do a checkpoint, and do a review. You may decide that after your flyers and brochures are produced is a good milestone and a good time to review your project. You may decide that it's okay after you've developed your ticketing system or your sales system or your queuing system that that's a good time to review your project. And finally, you may decide that it's okay after you've brought your security team on board and they've created a plan that says, okay, this is how we're going to escort people, this is how we're going to provide stewarding, this is how we're going to guard the VIPs or whatever.You can decide that after this point is a good place for your milestones.

?Well, my time is up now, but I hope I was able to give you some food for thought in terms of the planning process and the things that you need to consider, your deliverables, the activities to support those deliverables, and the sequencing of your activities. So, you identify all kinds of dependencies between the activities, the resources that you're going to use to do the activities, the costs, and the duration of the activities, and finally the milestones and the review points and when you're going to do them. Whether it's weekly, monthly, or at the end of a specific time-period. You can decide to have a review after certain phases or sections.

?Project management is really for everyone. It's not just about IT projects, it's also about business projects, and in this show, we talked about events.

?So please like, comment, or share. This is Sheldon St. Clair, and this is your weekly Wednesday Project Management Today's show.

?Our next broadcast is on Saturday at 10:00AM. I hope you'll be able to join us there as well.

?Okay, goodbye and enjoy the rest of the week. Goodbye now.