A Simple Process to Build a Rock Solid Project Plan
Project plans make or break a project, below are the steps that you can take to create a rock- solid plan that will deliver a successful project.
Project plans are critical to ensure that projects are delivered on time and budget. Without a plan, you, your team and your stakeholders won’t know what to build, how to build it and how long it should take.
A project schedule is a visual representation of the project tasks over time. Gantt charts are the most common example. A project plan includes the project schedule and plans for other components; such as a change management plan, testing plan, risk management plan, stakeholder management plan, and vendor management plan.
Project Management Framework
Each organisation will have different frameworks on how a project plan should be developed and may have templates that need to be completed by the project team. This allows the organisation to have standardised project plans and align with their governance processes.
This article will give you an overview of developing a project plan that you can use in any organisation with any level of project management maturity. It can be used within their project management framework.
The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), maintained by the Project Management Institute (PMI), provides a comprehensive framework for creating and running a project. Scrum and other Agile methodologies also provide frameworks for developing a plan - not necessarily for a project but for a product. Teams and organisations have used them to help deliver projects.
A summary of the steps to develop a project plan are:
Project Charter or Scope document
Project Requirements
Develop Work Breakdown Structure
Define and sequence activities (identified from WBS)
Estimate duration of activities
Develop a schedule
Integrate the plan from other domain areas
In large organisations with a complex technology architecture, various teams will be responsible for the delivery of each system. As the project manager, you’ll outsource the development work to these teams. They may be set up as Agile Trains or standard development teams.
In smaller organisations, the project manager will direct the development team to plan and develop the solution.
Project Charter
The Project Charter is a key input into the planning process. It provides the project with the objectives, scope, success criteria, constraints, assumptions, stakeholders list, high-level requirements and deliverables.
As the Project Charter is developed at the start of the project, it will be at a high level and things will change as the project progresses towards implementation. It provides a structure that the project plan can develop.
It may not necessarily be a Charter, it could be a Project Scope Document. It’s a document that provides the team with what needs to be delivered. You may have to work with the Project Sponsor or Business Owner to refine and clarify the documentation.
Requirements Gathering or Specification
As part of the process, the project team must go through Discovery to understand and document the detailed requirements or specifications. Whether you’re in an Agile team or a project team, this is an important activity to make sure the project documents what needs to be delivered and how the solution should work.
A system architectural design would be developed at this stage, identifying new systems and integration points with existing systems and how the solution should perform. This would fit into the next stage of creating a work breakdown structure.
Work Breakdown Structure
Requirements will determine what deliverables and activities that need to be done. The Work Breakdown Structure will help identify all the deliverables covered in scope. There are two previous articles on WBS that you can refer to.
The WBS covers all items in the scope of the project. It is an artefact that evolves throughout the life of the project. It needs to be updated and is the foundation for a lot of the downstream project management activities and deliverables.
An Under-Utilised but Effective Tool You Can Use To Improve Your Project's Success
Work Breakdown Structure is a core principle within the PMI’s PMBOK. They even created a Practice Standard for it. Love or loathe it, work breakdown structures play an important role in project management. You might think that you don’t use it at all. But when we plan, we use some sort of hierarchical breakdown of th…
How to use a Work Breakdown Structure to manage your project
A few newsletters ago, I wrote about the Work Breakdown Structure and what a powerful tool it is for you to manage your project. This second part is about the practical application of the WBS in your project.
Activity Sequencing
The WBS will provide you with a view of the activities that need to be done and from the requirements gathering, you and your team will be able to determine the activities that need to be done and the sequence of those activities. Dependencies will start to be visible and assumptions validation will help to provide clarity on the activities. It helps you to identify the logical order of activities and efficiently allocate resources and time. It will also assist in managing risks by identifying scheduling risks and managing bottlenecks caused by dependencies.
This will be where you identify the four types of dependencies between the activities:
Finish- Start. This is where Activity A finishes and Activity B can start
Finish - Finish. Activity A has to finish before Activity B can finish
Start - Start. Activity A has to start before Activity B can start.
Start- Finish. Activity A has to start before Activity B can finish.
For each activity, the team responsible can estimate the work that needs to be done. Ideally, the responsible team provide an early start, early finish, duration, late start, late finish and slack.
But most teams would just provide an estimate of when the work will start and finish. The contingency would have been baked into these estimates. If you work in a small organisation, you would deal directly with the development team and may need to facilitate sessions to get estimates for the work. The development teams may have a checklist or formula that they use to estimate the project.
The duration is then added to the activities to determine the length of each activity and determine the overall length of the project.
Adjust the plan for resource availability, how many resources you have available and when they start. You should also consider any risks, assumptions and dependencies and how they may impact your plan. For example, the tech lead is across multiple projects, so that will slow down the work on your project.
There are many methods other methods to sequence activities and put together a schedule. There will be a list in the resources section for you to delve deeper into them.
Other plans
Now you’ll need to consider the plans for the other components of the project and integrate them into the schedule. These would be change management, risk management, quality assurance, stakeholder management, cost management, scope management and vendor or procurement management.
These would take a similar approach. Large organisations would have standard processes and frameworks to manage these different components. Activities for these different areas would be included in the overall schedule as per the steps above.
Review, Approval and Execute
Once the schedule has been developed, it’ll need to be reviewed by the team and other stakeholders before going for final approval. Once the plan has been approved, it is baseline and the team will use it to execute.
The plan will need to be updated as the project progresses and new information comes out. Not all updates to plans are change requests. Material changes to the plan would need to go through change requests.
Plans are used for monitoring progress and managing the project. You could get progress updates from the teams and see how it is tracking. These could be daily updates, or during weekly meetings. It’s up to you. These updates can be used to communicate to your stakeholders.
“Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.” – Winston Churchill
I know I’ve used this quote often. I love it, it captures the key principle - it’s the planning that matters not the plan. Don’t over-complicate it. Keep it simple.
Make sure you plan your project and use it to deliver value to your customers, organisation and team.
Practice
In this month’s practice, try the activity sequencing and working out the type of dependencies between tasks. Develop a project schedule with a start and end date driven by the tasks. This will require you to put in the duration of each task.
Also consider any risks, issues, assumptions, external dependencies and contingencies that you need to include.
Let me know how you went and any insights that you got from the practice.
Resources
Here are some resources on different scheduling techniques to take you down the rabbit hole of the different methods. It’s important to know how they work. But remember keep your planning as simple as possible. Below are three methods
Program Evaluation and Review Technique
Quote
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Mike Tyson
With Mike Tyson and Jake Paul being in the media this month (if you don’t know about it, where have you been?!), I thought I’d share a quote attributed to Mike Tyson. This was probably said when he was at his peak and was the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world and everyone was gunning for him.
It goes hand in hand with the previous quote from Churchill. Planning is essential but plans don’t always go to plan. They change when circumstances change, assumptions become invalidated and things start going wrong.
You and your project team need to be adaptive and resourceful to roll with the punches.
How can you be more adaptive and resourceful?
My Resources
Below are some of my free resources if you’re new to project management.
Paid Resources
Simple and Effective Project Risk Management is for those new to project management, the accidental project manager and experienced PMs wanting to learn something new. It will teach you what you need to know and get you started quickly. I’m running a promotion where the first 10 people who buy this get a discount, pay only $19, and can book a 30-minute coaching call with me.