Project Management Essentials For Dummies, Australian and New Zealand Edition

Chapter 4

Planning with Deliverables First

In This Chapter

Planning with a difference — and avoiding activity-planning problems

Seeing the logic of a project-led approach

Going through the product-planning techniques

Realising the power of the Work Flow Diagram (WFD)

If you’ve been around projects before and come across other books or used project management software (actually it’s usually only scheduling software), you’ve seen the planning approach in which you first list all the activities or tasks for a project, and then draw up a Gantt Chart with its familiar horizontal bars (see Chapter 5 for more on this chart). To help you get to your task list, you may also have used a hierarchical diagram in which you can break down the major activities into more detail to determine a working list of tasks.

This chapter, however, starts the planning up front of the activities: Thinking about, understanding and defining what you need to deliver. Then, when you’re as clear as you can be on what you’re going to deliver, you can start thinking through what activities you need to build those ...