Project Management For Dummies, 6th Edition

Appendix

Combining the Techniques into Smooth-Flowing Processes

You’ll use the tools and techniques in this book many times during any given 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 a logical order, like the one in this appendix, for your project’s planning and control activities. Sticking to this order as much as possible discourages bad surprises (and their faithful companions — change and redirection).

Preparing Your Project Plan

Figure A-1 depicts the steps you should follow in project planning and the parts of the plan you need to produce along the way.

© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

FIGURE A-1: A flowchart of the activities and information in a project plan.

When you receive a project assignment, take the following steps to develop a plan for your project:

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

   To complete this step, you need to do two important activities:

   • Identify the stakeholders who will have a say in your project.
   • Get info from all the stakeholders and written sources about any and all expectations.

   See Chapter 3 for details on how you can use a cost-benefit analysis to compare anticipated project outcomes with the resources required to obtain them. In addition, ...