Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme

Chapter 4. How to Plan a Project

This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.

—Winston Churchill, English Prime Minister

The man who goes alone can start today, but he who travels with another must wait 'til that other is ready.

—Henry David Thoreau, American naturalist

Every moment spent planning saves three or four in execution.

—Crawford Greenwalt, President, DuPont

The hammer must be swung in cadence, when more than one is hammering the iron.

—Giordano Bruno, Italian philosopher

CHAPTER LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading this chapter, you will be able to:

• Understand the importance of planning a project

• Understand the purpose of the Joint Project Planning Session (JPPS)

• Know how to plan a JPPS

• Know the contents of the project proposal

• Recognize the difference between activities and tasks

• Understand the importance of the completeness criteria to your ability to manage the work of the project

• Explain the approaches to building the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

• Generate a complete WBS

• Use the WBS as a planning tool and reporting tool

• Understand top-down versus bottom-up processes for building the WBS

• Define a work package and its purposes

• Understand the difference between effort and duration

• Explain the relationship between resource loading and task duration

• List and explain the causes of variation in task duration

• Use any one of six task-duration estimation methods

• Understand the process of creating cost estimates at the task level

• Schedule people to project activities ...