Planning - Just Do It
Monday, January 28th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed
This project is too small to require a plan. I don’t know how to plan a project. I don’t have MS Project, and don’t know how to use it anyway. These are all excuses. I can’t think of too many projects, especially in a business, that are too small to plan. The previous post touched on how planning a project is no different than planning your vacation, except maybe in your level of experience. So give up all your excuses and come on over to the dark side.
The reality of planning is that you need no more specialized tools than a pad, a pen, and a calendar. And actually, these are the exact tools I would recommend you start out with. With just these three tools, you can create a very powerful project plan. Lets dive right in, shall we?
Take out your pad and your pen. Now write down at the top of the first page what the objective of the project is. Remember, a project should have only one primary objective. Lets say we are developing an info-product such as an ebook. Our objective for this project is to develop this ebook and its sales process. This may sound like two different objectives, and maybe it is, but without the product a sales process is useless, and vice versa, so I would consider this to be one objective. If we started trying to throw in marketing the product, I would say that is another project.
Once you have your project’s objective written down, it is time to start brainstorming a task list. So turn the page and start writing down all the tasks you can think of. Off the top of my head: write the ebook, editing, create pdf file, develop sales letter, determine payment processor, create other pages for site, test the operation of the site, upload the product. I know there are a lot more tasks, but this is just a quick list to start working with here.
Now that you have your task list started, start looking through it to determine what resources you will need. Again, shooting from the hip: Hosting, domain name, site template and graphics, pdf writer, payment processor. Some other potential resources could be a copywriter, a graphic artist, a web page designer, developer, ghost writer. I think you get the point here. You need to know what resources you will need to complete the project.
Going through these lists a few times will help you expand them. You can always ask for some feedback or input from other members of your project team if you are not working alone. If you are, you can ask for input from other internet marketers in forums or other places where you might network with them. You might have an ebook you purchased that has information about what this would involve. Use the information you have available now to develop the plan, and be prepared to change it as you go along.
You now have a task list and a resource list. The next step is to add some costs to your resource list, so you can start planning the budget. A little research goes a long way here. If you are not confident yet, you may want to plan this as a worst case scenario. What is the most you can expect a resource to cost? You are not hiring anyone yet, or buying anything. All you are doing now is setting the budget.
You can also take your task list and start to determine if any of the tasks have predecessor tasks. In other words, is there a task that needs to be completed before the next one can start. An example of this would be that the ebook would need to be written and then made into a pdf file before you upload it to the server. That would make writing the ebook a predecessor task to making the pdf file, and making the pdf file would be a predecessor task to uploading to the server.
Go through and look for these relationships in your tasks. Rewrite the tasks in such a way to show which ones have to come before others. You can also do this by numbering the tasks in the order they would need to be preformed, however you should be aware that it is likely there are tasks that are not dependent on any others. An example of this would be writing the ebook, which is not dependent on any other tasks to begin.
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