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

Planning and Conducting Joint Project Planning Sessions

All of the planning activities discussed so far to create the detailed project plan take place in a Joint Project Planning Session (JPPS). I advocate and use a group process for generating the detailed project plan. The JPPS is a group session in which all of the people who are involved in the project meet to develop the detailed plan. The session can last from one to three days, and it can be work-intensive. Conflict between session attendees is common, but the final result of this meeting is an agreement about how the project can be accomplished within a specified time frame, budget, resource availabilities, and according to client requirements.

My planning process shares many of the same features as Joint Requirements Planning (JRP) and Joint Applications Design (JAD) sessions. The JRP session is commonly used to design computer applications. My JPPS is robust – that is, it can be used for any type of project.

The objective of a JPPS is this: Develop a project plan that meets the COS as negotiated between the requestor and the provider, and as described in the POS and RBS. Sounds simple, doesn't it?

Unfortunately, that agreement doesn't often happen with any regularity, for many reasons. The client and the project team are generally impatient to get on with the work of the project. After all, there are deadlines to meet ...