Project planning
Project planning is the process to quantify the amount of time and budget a project will cost. The result is a project plan that a project manager can use to track the progess of his team.
The first step in making a planning is to determine the exact conditions for the project to be completed or to be terminated. Before it is absolutely clear what the goals of the project are, it makes little sense to start estimating how long it will take and how much it will cost. Unfortunately, many project managers fail to take this first, crucial step.
The second step in project planning is to make an inventory of all the work that needs to be done with an estimate of the time it will take to complete by a single team member. This can be done in a planning session with all the team members.
Tasks that will take over three weeks to complete need to be broken down further to get good granularity. To avoid getting swamped with details, the tasks at the lowest level should take approximately 1 week. The result is a work breakdown structure.
The next step is to define dependencies between tasks. Some tasks need to be completed before other tasks can begin. By putting tasks into their relative completion order, a project manager constructs a network graph of the project.
He can now calculate the minimum time the project will take: it is the longest path through the network graph from the start of the project until its end. This path is called the critical path. Other tasks can be done in parallel to the critical path but any delay in the tasks on the critical path will automatically result in a delay in the overall deadline of the project. Note that the critical path is not fixed, but can change because of insufficient staffing, insufficient resources, delays in the start and/or completion of non-critical tasks or other risks to a project.
Project planning is not something that is done only once at the beginning of the project. It should be an ongoing task of the project manager to keep an eye on the progress of his team and update the project plan accordingly.
The September/October 2001 issue of IEEE Software lists the Nine Deadly Sins of Project Planning:
- Not planning at all
- Failing to account for all project activities
- Failure to plan for risk
- Using the same plan for every project
- Applying prepackaged plans indiscriminately
- Allowing a plan to diverge from project reality
- Planning in too much detail too soon
- Planning to catch up later
- Not learning from past planning sins