How To Plan A Project

Your project success is determined by your planning toward it. Good planning not only make sure that your project gives the desired result, but also having it done as expected. When you are planning a project, it is important to make sure that the project can be measured in order to make sure that the project has the aimed result. You or the project manager can work on planning a project by creating new milestones and tasks in the planning section. But before it's all done there are several things to consider to be included in your project planning:

Bringing organization to a project
Planning a project and developing baselines
Allocating resources across several projects
Monitoring milestones and the earned value concept
Creating Status reports and briefing all levels of management
Project management support: Automated and administrative.

The reasoning behind this is that the human brain (even yours) can only take in and process so much information at one time. Managing Project Risk is a critical process within the Project Lifecycle. Again, very appropriate for all team members, in-house customers, marketing, and management, to learn how the process works and what their part in it is.

Schedule

Guesstimating schedules is notoriously difficult but it is helped by two approaches:
- Make your guesstimates of the simple tasks at the bottom of the work
- Break down structure and look for the longest path through the sequence diagram
Use the experience from previous projects to improve your guesstimating skills.

Resources

You can show on an alternative schedule that the project could be delivered by the deadline if certain (specified) resources are given to you or if other projects are rescheduled. Another possibility is to apply a different strategy, or more resources, to such activities to minimise the disruption. Within this phase, the people, resources, finances, suppliers and tasks must be correctly scheduled, in order for the Project Manager to be able to monitor and control the project delivery effectively. Following the creation of a Project Plan, a detailed assessment of the resources required to undertake the project should be made. The Financial Plan describes the total quantity of financial resources required during each stage of the project. Project management tools such as Microsoft Project provide significant functionality such as development of Gantt charts (timelines), comparison of planned to actual results, development of PERT charts (network diagrams), definition of tasks, definition of dependencies between tasks, assignment of resources to tasks, and resource balancing. Each deliverable has associated with it a work flow template identifying the activities, resources, and other deliverables that will be required to complete this deliverable.

Step

In planning any project, you follow the same simple steps: if an item is too complicated to manage, it becomes a list of simpler items. As a manager you have to look far beyond the single project; indeed any individual project can be seen as merely a single step in your team's development. One idea is to start with the number of steps -guess that if you can. These can be found by identify stages in the development of a project which are recognizable as steps towards the final product.

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Steven Moshe is senior consultant at ProjectBuildingConsultant.com. His blog on project building consultation can be found here: www.projectbuildingconsultant.com/blog. If you would like to add related site to the directory, you can do so by accessing Project Building Consultant's Link-exchange.

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