Project Office

Planning your project is one of the most important aspects of sucessful project management. These steps will guide you through the project planning process.

Step 1 Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

To plan a project you need to be sure that you have captured all of the deliverables and tasks that make up the finished product in a Work Breakdown Structure(WBS). Get your team together and ask them to spend 10 - 15 mins listing out all of the project tasks that they can think of and writing them on post-its.

When you have a plenty of post-its, write the end result of the project and place it at the top of the wall or on a white board. Underneath the final product put up post its representing the key deliverables. For example if you are implementing some new software the final product would be the 'Software launched'. Underneath might be 'Staff trained' and 'Software installed'. Arrange the post-its in a hierarchy like an organisation chart.

Step 2 Precedence Diagram or Work Flow Diagram

Now you know what you need to do, you need to work out in what order it needs to happen. Tape some flipchart paper to the wall or use whiteboard. Put the top deliverable from your work breakdown structure on to the right hand side of the board or paper. Then, take the post-its from your breakdown structure and arrange them in the order in which they need to happen.

Work from the left until you have mapped out the dependencies between the tasks and you have a sequence of tasks running from left to right. Finally draw arrows between the tasks that link up, and make sure that there aren't any tasks sitting isolated.

Type all of the tasks into your project planning software. As far as possible, try to follow the logical sequence that you mapped out with the post-its. Most planning software will enable you to link tasks so that you can accurately reflect the sequence in your diagram.

Now we have broken down the work and identified the Project Plan Dependencies it is time to estimate the effort for each task.

Step 3 Estimate effort

In a group session simply go through your project plan and ask your team to estimate the effort involved for each task.

Once you have entered the task effort, your planning software will automatically calculate the start and finish date for each task and provided you have entered the project logic correctly it will return an accurate possible end date.

At this point the end date can only be achieved if sufficient resource is available. That is why it is only a possible end date.

Step 4 Resource allocation

You have entered all of your tasks and task duration in your scheduling software, so now it is time to add resources. Resources are usually people, but they can also be materials, for example machinery or automated process.

Against each task enter in the name of the person, machine, or process who will be responsible for the task's completion. Where possible enter a named person, this will help you to hold them accountable for progress and to manage their work by producing to do lists, calendars and work load profiles.

The skill in project planning comes in balancing two key factors: time and resource. Plans may show a finish date that is acceptable, but resource may be overloaded to achieve that date. Alternatively resource requirements may be within limits, but the project end date is much later than your Client would like.

There are many ways to resolve scheduling issues and more detail is given in the resources section.

Summary

Thank you for reading this guide to project planning. You have probably noticed how important it is to complete each step. Step 1 ensures that you have captured all of the work. Step 2 defines the order of the work. Step 3 focuses on accurately estimating the effort and stage 4 brings everything together by adding resources. By following these simple steps you can considerably increase your chances that the project will be delivered on time, on budget and to quality.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/project-management-articles/how-to-plan-a-project-in-four-simple-steps-5643480.html

Need to plan your project? Don't know where to start? Use Ready made project plan templates used on real world projects.

• Software Project Plan
• Conference Project Plan (large conference)
• Website Project Plan

Each plan comes with a detailed user guide with project planning tips and techniques for managing project planning challenges.