• 21 Ways to Excel at Project Management

Planning the Project

Question 3: Have you developed a detailed project plan?

Good Practice: A detailed project plan should be developed and signed off by the steering committee. It provides the following benefits:

• Translates the high-level business objectives into a detailed roadmap of concrete deliverables.
• Provides a detailed list of resource requirements.
• Provides a realistic assessment of project timescales.
• Allows estimated project costs to be further validated.
• Allows issues to be identified early on, such as tasks taking longer than expected, slippage in target dates, and team members not being productive.

Base the plan on known metrics. How long did an earlier similar project take?

Involve all team members, not just senior management. Develop a plan in iterations over several weeks by consulting team members and drawing on their experience.

Common Mistakes

• Having no project plan.
• Having a wrong project plan. A wrong project plan is worse than having no project plan at all. Do not be swayed by a sexy-looking project plan that has been produced to give the steering committee a warm, comfortable feeling but which is not based on reality.
• As with all methodologies, a healthy dose of common sense and pragmatism is required. Do not be too fastidious. For example, a 5-day project does not need a detailed project plan.
• Do not lose sight of what the project is trying to achieve. Traditional project management techniques can encourage overplanning and an excessive focus on micro-level tasks at the cost of the overall objective.
• Disbelieving evidence from past projects and insisting the current project be done faster with fewer people.
• Committing to or baselining project plans too early.

Note: Trying to manage a large and complex project without a project plan is like crossing an unknown continent without a map. You are running blind. The critical thing to get right is the balance between planning and action. Take the example of driving from London to Paris: too much planning and other cars will be halfway there before you leave; too little, and you will turn up at the Eurotunnel terminal in Folkestone without passports.

A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.

Warning Sign: When successive project milestones get missed, this is a sure sign that a project is failing.