Project Management Step by Step

STEP 3: CREATE YOUR PROJECT PLAN

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Project plans do not always provide the answer you want to hear. For

example, you may have a condition that the project is to be completed

by the end of May, but the plan shows it will take until the end of July.

Alternatively, you may have a maximum of £10k to spend on your

project, but the plan shows it will cost £25k. The Project Plan enables

you to check that you can actually do the work within the conditions

defined, and that it makes sense for you to do it.

Project Plans sit at the core of managing projects and so this is one of

the longest chapters in the book. Good planning is what enables a

project manager to take the understanding of what is to be delivered and

reliably make this happen to a predicted cost and time. Doing any

complex task without planning first means you do not know how long

it will take and how much it will cost – and such predictability is often

essential in business and private life. More critically, without a plan your

ability to meet the original objectives of the project (the ‘why’ and the

‘what’) is completely uncertain. Without a plan you are stepping out

into the dark.

Introduction to the Project Plan and estimating

The next few pages of this chapter provide an introduction to project

planning and estimating, by presenting all the information you need to

understand before you create your Project Plan. The subsequent section

then applies this knowledge and presents the actual steps to develop a

plan through a detailed worked example.

How you will do your project and achieve the objective you are setting

out to achieve is defined in a document called the Project Plan. At one

level, a Project Plan is just the list of tasks you need to do to complete

your project. Essentially, this plan shows the order of the tasks, the

length of time each task will take, and who is responsible for doing each

one. The plan is used for many things, but most importantly:

●

It enables you to understand how long a project will take, and how

much it will cost to do.

●

It provides information you can use to explain the project to other

people.

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PROJECT MANAGEMENT: STEP BY STEP

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●

It allows you to allocate work to different people in the project. This

is very important as a plan is as much a tool to do work allocation

and management of people, as for understanding the length of time

it will take.

●

It is the basis for managing your project to a successful completion

(as will be described in Chapter 4).

Professional project managers have a huge set of tools, a vast set of

jargon, and usually some helpful experience to produce plans. The work

to produce the plan for a major programme of work requires skill and

expertise, but the fundamental activities in producing a plan are not that

complex and are easy to apply for reasonable sized projects. Planning

builds on the normal human approach of breaking problems that are

too large to resolve in one go into smaller chunks, and this process is

called decomposition by project managers.

I am first going to define the logical activities in producing a plan, and

then I shall describe how to create a plan in practice. The six activities in

producing a plan are to:

1. Divide the overall project into its component tasks, and continue

to divide the component tasks into smaller tasks until you have a

comprehensive list of things that must be done to complete the

project.

2. Estimate the length of time each task will take.

3. Order the tasks into the right sequence.

4. Determine the people, money and other resources you need to

meet this plan and determine their associated costs.

5. Check what resources you actually have available and refine your

plan to take account of this. Once you have done this you have a

complete plan.

6. Review the plan – does it match your needs? Looking at the plan –

can you actually do it, and should you do it?

The six activities are shown here as a simple logical sequence. In practice

you will go through these activities several times before your plan is in a

state you are fully happy with. Before you start to develop your plan, I

introduce these topics in some more detail.

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