Project Planning

Plans are nothing; planning is everything

You have now gained more knowledge about your project. Working on the SOW helped you refine a number of aspects of your project. You should now start project planning, which involves:

• Detailing the project’s requirements.
• Detailing the activities that make up your project – you will use the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) to accomplish this.
• Creating a network diagram to determine the dependencies among the activities.
• Identifying the resources (people, equipment, facilities, etc.) you need for the project.
• Establishing a schedule for your project and refining its scope.
• Putting all of the information into a project management plan that will become the baseline document for your project.

Tip: Remember to get the plan approved by the main stakeholders of the project.

“Projects happen in two ways: a) Planned and then executed or b) Executed, stopped, planned and then executed ” - Unknown author

Requirements

Before working in your project, you should determine and analyze your customer’s requirements to be able to define and estimate the needed effort and resources to execute the project. And accordingly to correctly plan for the project’s deadline. Clear and concise requirements help a lot in this exercise. The next steps forward depend a lot on the requirements. They start with the WBS (Work Breakdown Structure).

WBS

To begin the project planning process, start working on the WBS, which is an effective tool that helps you list all the tasks involved in your project. The WBS allows you to group all the tasks under main activities ensuring that you have a clear overview of what you need to execute during the project.

Tip: Careful with the level of detail in your WBS, 3 levels is good; 5 the limit, and 7 becomes unwieldy.

A good way of developing your project’s WBS is by using the major milestones/deliverables that you identified in your SOW. Once the milestones have been identified, brainstorm with your project team to detail the tasks that you must accomplish in order to achieve the milestones. It is advisable to break-up the work into manageable “chunks” (maximum work activity duration of 5-10 man-days, or 40-80 man-hours).
If you and your team are familiar with the project, a milestone approach will work very well. If this is not the case, then consider including in your workshops someone who may not be on your project team but has previously completed a similar project.

“Running a project without a WBS is like going to a strange land without a roadmap” - J. Phillips

Here is a simplified WBS for the design of a website:

For more complex projects with a higher level of detail, you can choose the following format for your WBS: