Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme, Sixth Edition

CHAPTER 5

How to Plan a TPM 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 WBS from the RBS
• 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 ...