Project Management For Dummies®, UK Edition

Chapter 5

Planning with Deliverables First

In This Chapter

Planning with a difference – and avoiding the activity-planning problems

Seeing the logic of a product-based approach

Going through the product-planning techniques

Releasing huge progress and quality management power as bonuses

If you’ve been around projects for a while 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 6 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: it starts with 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 deliverables.

This chapter makes the case for the product-led or product-based approach to planning and also gives you some extremely powerful techniques. The product-led approach is extremely logical, and it’s hard to overstate just how very good it is. Not only is it an enormous help in planning, but it also opens the door to particularly effective quality management ...