Steps in Project Planning

What steps do I need to take to prepare a project plan? 1. Establishing the projects parameters In this step its needed to give the project a name and assign a reference number after witch you can state the projects overall purpose, for example The project has to do this, or that. This has to be done in just a few sentences explaining on anyones understanding. After this in the same way you have to state the projects end results state. How will it look in the end, what it will deliver on completion. You do this by including a quality grade. The final parameters are the time constraints, the project deadline and the budget allowance. 2. List the projects End Items Do a zoom out of the project. At this step you dont have to be very specific and detailed. Break the project into parts that have to be delivered at specific time, based on specifications and requirements from the customer. Distinguish between high and low priority items, the ones that must be included and the ones that the project supports to be delivered without. Create a list with major tasks to be done at each step in the project. And specify specific outputs, or outcomes from each task. 3. Set the project milestones Mark the important phases of the project along the way as checkpoints especially the beginning an the end ones. Create a draft of the project development plan with the entire project and distribute it to all essential stakeholders. This draft will be reviewed and analyzed by each stakeholder and will the outcome will be a project plan nearly concluded. All participating managers should examine their activity schedules based on the plan draft and tune the draft accordingly. The milestones are being set so that it will avoid the panic, chaos, overload, overtime and over budget that could be encountered at the delivery of the project. 4. Identification of the activities, tasks and relationships Earlier in the project these have been limited to major activities and tasks, but as the project is progressing more detailed informations become available. If we did a zoom out at an earlier step in the project, now we have to do a zoom in and look carefully at each activity and task. Dont get to this step to earlier because you risk to overdo this step. In this step we can establish a network schedule by inserting activities between milestones. These activities must be carefully balanced in effort over a period of time. 5. Estimation of time and cost for each activity. The estimation step is a discipline like scheduling.

This step requires an identification of the resources required for each activity and task. Time being a resource we have to estimate the time available, and the quality that can be reached in a specific time. Another resource are the costs. The activities must be synchronized with the availability of the money and must not go over the budget allocated. In the beginning we can only have a top down estimation, but as details evolve these estimates should be developed bottom up based on specific costs. The overhead items should also be taken into consideration. 6. Establish the Quality grade To make a reliable estimation for the entire project you only have to know the whole project scope. All the project deliverables, and all the tasks and activities associated. If you know these you can easily make a guess if the established quality grade can be achieved or not. You must also know the quality grade of each deliverable. Here you zoom in and see the significant impact on the amount of work and resources involved in specific tasks and activities. From here you can get the time and cost. 7. Final thought on project planning Even if the plan is not done very well, in the end any plan is better than no plan. If the plan is reasonable then it is far better than any plan. And a reasonable plan with first rate implementation is much more better than a first rate plan with poor implementation.