0.11 Project planning

After the project has been defined and the project team has been appointed, you are ready to enter the second phase in the project management life cycle: the detailed project planning phase.

Project planning is the heart of the project life cycle, and tells everyone involved where you’re going and how you’re going to get there. The planning phase is where the project plans are documented, the project deliverables and requirements defined, and the project schedule created. It involves creating a set of plans to help guide your team through the execution and closure phases of the project. The plans created during this phase will help you to manage time, cost, quality, change, risk and related issues. It will also help you manage staff and external suppliers, to ensure that you deliver the project on time and within schedule.

The project planning phase is often the most challenging phase for a project manager, as you need to make an educated guess of the staff, resources and equipment needed to complete your project. You may also need to plan your communications and procurement activities, as well as contract any 3rd party suppliers.

The purpose of the project planning phase is:

• Establish business requirements.
• Establish cost, schedule, list of deliverables and delivery dates.
• Establish resource plan.
• Get management approval and proceed to the next phase.

The basic processes of the project planning are:

• Scope planning specifies the in-scope requirements for the project and facilitates creating the work breakdown structure.
• Preparing the work breakdown structure specifies the breakdown of the project into tasks and sub tasks.
• Project schedule development specifies the entire schedule of the activities detailing their sequence of execution.
• Resource planning specifies who will do what work at which time of the project and if any special skills are needed to accomplish the project tasks.
• Budget planning specifies the budgeted cost to be incurred in the completion of the project.
• Procurement planning focuses on dealing with vendors outside of your company
• Risk management planning charts the risks, contingency plan and mitigation strategies.
• Quality planning for quality assurance to be applied to the project.
• Communication planning on the communication strategy with all project stakeholders.

The planning phase refines the project’s objectives gathered during the initiation phase and plans the steps necessary to meet those objectives by further identifying the specific activities and resources required to complete the project. Now that these objectives have been recognized, they must be clearly articulated entailing an in-depth scrutiny of the recognized objective. With such scrutiny, our understanding of the objective will change. Often the very act of trying to describe something precisely gives us a better understanding of what we are looking at. This articulation serves as the basis for the development of requirements. What this means is that after an objective has been clearly articulated (clearly stated) we can go about the business of stipulating in concrete terms what we have to do to achieve it. Obviously, if we do a poor job of articulating the objective, our requirements will be misdirected and the resulting project will not represent the true need.