Planning - Write It Down
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed
The planning process typically produces a number of documents which will help you to execute your project and to monitor and control it as it goes along. What documents do you really need to effectively work your project plan? There are really only a few documents that you need.
In the last post we discussed resource lists and task lists. Your resource list is a listing of all the resources you need in your project along with their costs. The task list is the listing of all the tasks you need to complete, set out in an order so that you know which tasks must precede others.
You might at this point want to begin assigning resources to the tasks. In essence, you are combining these lists in such a way as to ensure that every task has at least one resource associate with it. If you are the only member of your project team, you might be the human resource assigned to all of these tasks, but you might also have other resources, such as specific software, that will also be assigned.
Doing this helps you to plan for when you will need some of the specific resources on the list. You might not want to begin the copywriting until after the first draft of the book is completed, so that you know what the book will offer. Or you might not want to design the graphics until you have the title, so you can incorporate the title into the header graphic.
The important document that all of this leads up to is your schedule. You want to ensure that you develop your schedule so that you are taking into account the availability of resources or the time you expect tasks to take. Use your calendar and assign tasks for each day you will work. In your schedule you should set up check points or milestones. These will function to make you aware of how you are doing with the schedule. When you complete the task that marks a milestone, you’ll want to check it against your original schedule to determine if you are on, ahead of, or behind your schedule. Ideally, you will be tracking this more often than that, so you know if you are going to hit your milestone date before you get there.
That’s all the documents you really need to effectively plan most projects. The resource list with costs, the task list set up to show precedence and with assigned resources, and your schedule. While there are many more documents you could put together, there is no reason for them at this time. There are a couple you might want to be aware of which might be useful to you in larger projects.
One is a scope document. You might want to have a document outlining the detailed scope of the project if you have a couple of team members working with you on the project. It helps to write out the scope to ensure that you are all on the same page with regard to what the project is, and what it is not.
Another would be a change control process. When you are working by yourself, you probably don’t need a formalized process for reviewing and approving changes, but as soon as you add additional team members into the mix, this can become very important. You always want to be in control of changes happening to your project, and this document will give you some of that control.
One final note I wanted to touch on regarding documentation. Having all of the project documentation written out will prove to be very important. It will allow you to track changes to your original project plan. Everyone knows how important testing and tracking is to the success of their business in general, and it is just as important to each individual project. And like a grocery store list, it can help you stay on budget and help ensure that you complete everything.
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