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Where am I?
- Project Management
Knowledge
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Project Planning Overview |
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Project Planning Overview |
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The quotation and ultimately the business case are based
around what the end-customer requires and how the organisation proposes to
deliver those requirements. These can be further separated into confirmed
and assumed. However for any that are assumed there is a risk that the
assumption may not be correct which could adversely impact achievement of
the project objectives. In most cases an organisation will therefore
attempt to minimise the number of assumptions as soon as possible.
The different information categories are shown in the
diagram below: J |
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The “What” (also called the Project Product) which needs
to be delivered to the end customer typically includes elements of
physical parts and submission documents. At project launch the majority of
these will be confirmed, however some may still be assumed. Where any are
assumed the worst case scenario they are not correct should be identified
and managed through the standard risk management process. |
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The next step is for the team
to identify all the deliverables, or elements of “How”, that will be
needed to deliver the “What”. A sample of these is shown below. These are
only the deliverables, not the activities that are required to produce
them. These were created in Visio but they could be produced as a table in
Excel etc.
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The next step is to identify
the dependencies between the deliverables. At this stage there is no
consideration of resource constraints or specific timing, just the order
of the deliverables. The example below only includes a sample of the
deliverables from above: |
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The next step is to identify
the activities and resource types / usage to produce each of the
deliverables. If the organisation already has pre-defined Work Packages
for the main deliverables this information will be largely generic and
will just require a limited amount of project-specific customisation.
Note: The use of Work Packages also limits the amount of activity detail
that is needed in the timing plan.
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Once the dependencies between
all of the deliverables are understood, along with the activities /
responsibilities for each one, it is possible to build them into a timing
plan. The first pass does not take into account any resource constraints.
An example is shown below:
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The basic plan can then be
altered in order to level the required resources around the actual
availability. The project stages can also be defined at this point. The
example below shows levelled resource for illustration however the
activities in the diagram have not actually been moved.
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For more
information, please contact us
info@appliedlogic.ltd.uk or +44 (0)
7860 902530 |
