Project Planning - Part 1

As you all are aware, project planning is the heart of any activity. You know that you have to plan if you want to throw a party, if you want to go on a vacation, if you want to admit your child in a school, so on. You need to plan at the right time, revisit the plan when necessary and should be ready to accommodate any changes that creep up, without losing your goals.

So is the case of Project Planning. When you are asked to manage a project, the first thing that you would do is to plan the project that includes the requirements, timeline and budget. You will be mostly given the requirements and sometimes the timeline also as the input to your planning.

In the software development projects, this is tricky. As you are aware, the initial requirements may get changed during the course of the project. You may suddenly realize that the requirements that your team has completed development are obsolete now. You may also get new requirements at any point of time, which requires your team to redo certain activities such as design. All this amounts to schedule slippages and / or budget overrun.

There comes the need of having a holistic approach for project management including project planning. Points to remember and remind yourself from time to time are:

1. Project Planning is just not arriving at the deliverables based on       requirements, estimate the effort and come up with the schedule

2.  Yes, these are the activities that are part of project planning, but your job does not end with it

3. You need to concentrate on the following throughout the duration of the project –

   * Arrive at the initial project plan within a week of the inception of the project. 

  * Get it reviewed by the stakeholders. (You need to know who all the stakeholders for the given project are)

    * This is the right time to sort out any discrepancies that surface with the stakeholders

    * Share the plan with the team. Better make it available online with read access to everyone involved in the project

    * If the team has feedback on the plan, be open to receive it. After all, they are the executors of the plan. Discuss it out with the team if there are any project constraints

   * Focus on team collaboration. Have the schedule updated by the team. Discuss with the team on their progress periodically and also on need basis

   * Be a mediator among the cross-functional groups and also with the customer

   * Have intermediate working deliverables to get ratified by the customer, whether the customer asks for them or not

   * This makes a working product ready at any point of time and facilitates handling changed and / or new requirements

   * You be aware of the new trends in the technology and / or domain so that you can take the lead in discussing the possible changes in the upcoming product to suit the current time. Include the relevant stakeholders including customer in such discussions. Forget not mailing the meeting minutes to everyone involved with the project. This way you can avoid surprises from others that may topple you plan.

   * Last, but not the least, work towards team cohesion. You can choose the option right for you and your team – ranging among the team building activities

We have not discussed the core project planning activities yet. The above activities are required irrespective of the project management methodology you have chosen. You need to blend them with the core activities to achieve the results not losing focus on the objectives.