Vital ingredients for a good plan

A brilliant project manager knows that putting together a credible and robust plan is one of the foundation stones of effective project management.  Although planning is as much an art as it is an exact science, there are also some sound guiding principles that anyone can pick up and run with.

The project plan captures in one concise document what you’ve been asked to do and how you intend to deliver.  It documents all the key points related to a project ranging from its objectives and deliverables, right through to the key milestones and resource requirements.

Here are some important things to think about in putting together any project plan:

• Do your customers have a good understanding of the project’s underlying objectives?  If your customers are not clear about what they want to achieve, your job of putting together a plan is made more difficult.  At the beginning of a project, you’ll often be faced with hazy objectives and requirements.  If that’s the case, getting these fundamentals clarified must become an important early aim of your project - before it goes any further off track.
• Is the scope of the project clear?  Draw a boundary around what the project will deliver.  Bear in mind that spelling out what’s not going to be addressed by the project can be as useful as a specifying what is within scope. The history of projects is littered with assumptions about what is “obviously” implied by the items in scope – only for it to emerge that customer and supplier had, in all good faith, quite different expectations.
• What’s my project going to deliver?  Make sure all the tangible deliverables are defined and agreed up front.  It shouldn’t be hard for you to describe your project this way.  If this is a difficult task, you’ll be provided with a timely warning regarding your lack of understanding about your final destination.
• What resources does my project need?  You need to establish what kinds of resources you require, how much of each you need and when you want them.  Your project sponsor will want to keep a close eye on costs.  Be wary of demands to reduce costs when the budget is already optimistic!
• How long am I going to take?  Primarily your customer will want to know when you expect the project to deliver, but they’ll also want some proof your dates were not just plucked out of thin air.  It’s important to resist the temptation to come up with a crowd pleasing initial offering with wildly optimistic delivery dates.  It’s far better to set out your stall with a schedule that’s realistic and well thought out.

There’s an enormous temptation at the start of a project to role up your sleeves and get cracking – perhaps to start work on a highly visible, meaty project task and make an immediate impression as a doer.  This is just like a builder starting to lay bricks before the architect is consulted.  In contrast, when George Washington famously decided to fell a tree, he spent plenty of time sharpening the axe before a quick burst of activity completed his mission.  We’re strong advocates of this measured and planned approach.

Methods Consulting comment

As the second-largest supplier of client-side consulting services in the UK, much of Methods Consulting's work centres on ensuring that a sound business case is in place from the outset of any proposed project or programme.  In our view, this always involves defining key objectives in terms of business benefits, scope, and deliverables as Barker and Cole suggest– and agreeing how these will be measured, which is not always straightforward, especially in the case of ‘softer’ objectives.  In our view, the OGC Gateway framework offers an invaluable tool for effective planning, setting out a handy checklist of important questions to ask when planning a project: see the checklist at Gateway Review 1: Business Justification at http://www.ogc.gov.uk/documents/cp0005.pdf.