You need to clarify the organisational, user and often the system requirements needed to achieve your project goals. The team needs to elaborate on costs, scope and schedule estimates to allow management make decisions and ensure responsibilities are understood.
Create a professional set of interconnected project management plans: cost, scope, HR, risk, time, procurement, quality, stakeholder & communications. Produce performance baselines for: scope, schedule & cost. Agree an approach to change.
The process of creating a professional set of project management plans ensures that your project has been fully thought through. Following the plans moves the project towards agreed goals. Management decisions can be based on confirmed costs, timelines and realities of what can be delivered.
It is the expertise and necessarily concerted effort that is applied during project planning, that separates project management from other management approaches. The front end loading of the process saves time and money. We know project planning.
PMBOK Planning process groupPMBOK Planning process groupThis PMBOK process uses all of the knowledge areas and includes a massive 20 processes. These occur throughout the project until we start immediately after the project charter is approved. The main output here is the project management plan, its various strategies and baselines.The project management plan contents are used throughout the project to was the actual performance against plan, variances and forecasts. But unless the project is very small, the plan details will be fairly high level these are refined as the project moves through its various phases or stages. This is called rolling wave planning where aspects of the project management plan are updated at the end of each stage or phase as part of seeking approval to proceed.The sequence in which the PMBOK processes take place are fairly logical although an amount of iteration will normally take place.The PMBOK processes that contribute to developing the project management plan are:
Collect requirements
Define scope
Create work breakdown structure
Define activities
Sequence activities
Estimate activity resources
Estimate activity durations
Develop schedule
Estimate costs
Determine budget
Plan quality
Develop human resource plan
Plan communications
Plan risk management
Identify risks
Perform qualitative risk analysis
Perform quantitative risk analysis
Plan risk responses
Plan procurements
Formal authorisation of the project by Senior Management
While a business case can stack up, it initiself will not convince
Set with the impossible task of predicting the future, the planning process takes the project goals, captures and commit to what can be understood, give estimates for what cannot at this time be known, and resize the plan as you proceed. If anyone tells you any different, smile and walk away.
We know why projects fail. We prevent these failures by planning.
Organisations that need support making a decision on an idea that has one or more of the following dimensions:
...
Relative Effort and Time:
Relative Effort and Time:
You will have:
Senior decision makers committed to:
- authorise the formation of the project team with enough resources for the planning stage
- delegate authority by assigning responsibility to a project manager.
formally authorise the project to proceed by a project charter that sets out
To delegate authority by assigning responsibility to a project manager;
The project team is formed and will understand
- their project roles and responsibilities for the planning stage
The project team will be ready for perhaps the most important stage of any project, the planning stage. It is this highly driven stage where front loading of effort occurs reducing the chances of failure and the costs of change once
All stakeholders are identified and a plan is in place to work with them
If you need pre planning support click here >
We will work with you to:
You can be confident that:
From experience we understand the forces that want to see action and don't appreciate planning. Here are just 3 common reasons:
Planning will begin with wild guesses, educated guesses and informed guesses, which is fine so long as it remains obvious that they are just guesses. When your uninformed or unscrupulous colleagues hear a guess and try to make it stick, you will waste too much energy undoing the damage. If asked for a guess on day one, decline to answer, 'its too early for that". If thats pushed back on and you are forced then go for it and say "anywhere from 1 to 7 years", Planning can accommodate these in the initial stages, but must replace them with estimates as soon as possible.
...
...
The experience you will have with one of our services will be great, but choosing us to implement our framework will change your organisation forever. Its a rare chance to develop a corporate asset. If you want project planning (along with all other project management capabilities) organisation wide and always to hand, our core solution, "Pro" project management framework solution, tailored to your company, can be put in place at a fraction of the cost of a few individual initiation engagements.
Learn more about a permanent solution
Every project has unique planning needs. We know how to make them more efficient, more forward-looking, and more proficient at creating profitable growth.
Our planning approach will turn hunches and guesses that you should not act upon, into estimates that everyone can get behind.
There is no other aspect of project management that differentiates it from other management approaches than planning. Project planning can be thought of as the decision to front end load of the planning effort, compared to the jump in and get it done approach of operational management approaches, is required because of these dimensions:
- its inherent size usually measured in terms of value;
- the degree of technical difficulty (complication) involved in the work;
- the degree of uncertainty involved in defining its objectives;
- the complexity of the relationships surrounding the project.
The planning effort will turn hunches and guesses that you cannot act upon, into estimates that everyone can get behind.
A plan without agreement is next to useless.
You cannot know the future but you can plan for it.
You cannot predict the future but you can prepare for it
Narrowing down the countless possibilities
Planning is the discipline that separates project management from other types of management. The willingness to resist the temptation to jump in and begin execution can be counterintuitive.
Set with the impossible task of predicting the future, the planning process takes the project goals, captures and commit to what can be understood, give estimates for what cannot at this time be known, and resize the plan as you proceed. If anyone tells you any different, smile and walk away.
