Project Management for Dummies, 2nd UK Edition

Chapter 9

Planning at Different Times and Levels

In This Chapter

Dividing your project into manageable pieces – the stages

Developing Stage Plans

Deciding on work assignments and making more-detailed plans

A great temptation in project planning is to dive into the fine detail and start ‘counting rivets’ before you’re even sure what the project is really about. That’s certainly true of planning, and a danger for most people involved in projects is that they go too deep too quickly in planning. 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. In Chapter 2 you may already have seen the quotation from Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Simon & Schuster), which is ‘Begin with the end in mind’. It makes sense to check out the high-level stuff before you get into the 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 ...