Project Management Essentials For Dummies, Australian and New Zealand Edition

Chapter 7

Planning at Different Times and Levels

In This Chapter

Dividing a project into manageable pieces — the stages

Developing Stage Plans

Deciding on work assignments and making more-detailed plans

Agreat temptation in project planning is to dive into the fine detail and start ‘counting rivets’ before you’re sure of what the project really entails. That’s certainly true of planning, and a danger for most people involved in projects is that they go too deep too quickly. The approach in this book, though, is to work at different levels of planning detail at different times. Here are a few reasons why it makes sense to get the ‘helicopter view’ before going into detail:

• You may be heading in the wrong direction and be doing all sorts of detailed planning on the wrong stuff. It makes sense to check out the high-level before going into detail.
• Things change, particularly in business projects. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to do the detailed planning a long way ahead, because you can be sure that things will have changed by the time you get there and a lot of your work will be wasted.
• Until you’ve seen the bigger picture clearly, you’re not going to get the detail right, ...