PROJECT PLANNING PROCESS (free Business e-Coach)

Project Planning

"A carelessly planned project takes three times longer to complete than expected; a carefully planned project takes only twice as long" –– Golub's Law

Project Planning Activities

Defining the scope

Project Management: Business Synergies Approach

Validate what the customer expects from the project and project success and failure criteria that criteria the customer will use to evaluate results
Clearly define the tasks, basic conditions, project objectives and final outcome(s)
Define the project boundaries - what's included and not included in the project
Identify all stakeholders - persons or groups of persons who are participating in the project, are interested in the project performance, or are constrained by the project

Organizing the work

10 Key Project Leader Skills

Make sure you have the right people on the team
Make sure all stakeholders have some type of representation on the team
Break the final deliverable down into manageable parts
Assign each part to team member

Assessing risk

Explore what might go wrong and identify countermeasures to prevent problems from occurring

Developing a project schedule

Identify project phases, milestones and outcomes schedules and schedule all the works that must be accomplished to meet the project key dates and objectives

Resource planning

Identify resources required - project personnel, equipment, materials and facilities
Optimize scheduling with respect to all available and procurable resources

Developing the project budget

Identify and quantify the prospective costs of project outcomes
Develop a spending budget

Writing the project plan

Gather the procedures that will be used to make changes in the plan
Compile the information developed during the planning into a formal project plan and get it approved.

Setting Up a Responsibility Matrix

4 Steps

List the stakeholder groups. Stakeholder groups are listed on the horizontal axis of the responsibility matrix. Groups such as project team and user council should be named rather than individual team members: these individual team assignments are documented in the project plan. It is appropriate however to put individual names on the responsibility matrix whenever a single person will be making decisions or has complete responsibility for a significant part of the project... More

Discover much more!

Jokes

7 Phases of a Project

Project Management: Two Approaches

50 Rules of Project Management

If you don’t plan, it doesn’t work. If you do plan, it doesn’t work either. Why plan!

The nice thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression.

The person who says it will take the longest and cost the most is the only one with a clue how to do the job... More

Planning Activities

The planning activities that you, with the help of your team members, will need to do for the project are listed below:

To recruit and build the team
To organize the project
To identify and confirm the start and end dates through a project schedule
To create the project budget
To identify clearly the customer requirements for the final outcome
To define the project scope boundaries - what it included and not included in the project
To write a description of the final outcome
To decide who will do what
To assign accountability

Easy Project Plan

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5 Factors that Make a Project Successful

By: Eric Verzuh, the author of The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management

To be successful, a project must have:

A plan that demonstrates what is possible, shows an overall path and clear responsibilities, contains the details for estimating the people, money, time, equipment, and materials necessary to get the job done, and will be used to measure progress during the project and act as an early warning system... More

GREAT Model

By: Michael S. Dobson

To make your project team function effectively, the first thing you need to know is the GREAT model: Goals; Results; Expectations / Performance; Accountabilities / Abilities; Timing.

The GREAT model specifies what people must know before they can work together effectively... More

Murphy's Law in Project Management

If a project requires 'n' components, there will be "n-1" units in stock... More