Project Management For Dummies®

Appendix B. Combining the Techniques into Smooth Flowing Processes

You'll use the tools and techniques in this book many times during your project ‐ as you hammer out your initial plan, monitor work in progress and its results, and continue to tweak the details as necessary. Even though you can't avoid surprises or changes as your project unfolds, you can provide logical order for your project's planning and its control activities. This sense of order discourages bad surprises (and their faithful companions ‐ change and redirection). In this appendix, I illustrate this order.

Preparing Your Project Plan

Figure B-1 depicts the steps in project planning and the parts of the plan that you produce along the way.

Figure B.1.  Figure B-1: Flowchart of the activities and information in a project plan.

When you receive a project assignment, you can take the following steps:

1. Clarify the reasons for the project and the desired outcomes.

   Figure B-1 illustrates the two important activities you need to do:

   1. Identify the audiences who will have a say in your project.

   2. Get all info from the audiences and written sources about expectations.

   Perform these two activities interactively because the initial statement of your assignment may suggest additional audiences. Those audiences, in turn, may raise more issues to address. The outcomes from these activities are a Statement of Work (SOW) and an Audience List. ...