Developing A Project Plan
April 28th, 2008 | by Ahmed Arbab |Whether it’s project plan or a project timeline, you must develop and maintain a document that clearly outlines the project milestones and major activities required to for your project.
This document needs to include the date each objective and major activity is to be completed. The project plan also needs to be created in the beginning, and a baseline version approved by the team as soon as possible.
In the beginning you will probably not know of all the major activities required to implement your project, it is important that you create a draft of the activities you think may need to be tracked via a formal document.
Take some time and really think through what you know about the objective of your project. From similar projects, look at some historical data. If you think you are off base you can even have a few informal meetings with knowledgeable individuals you can use as a sounding board. If a little effort is put you’ll be surprised how good a draft you can develop.
This draft will help you to speak with subject matter experts (SMEs) and stakeholders to flesh out the project plan. If you don’t make some level of effort to develop a rough draft, you may not give a good impression which will make it harder for you to obtain the support of the persons you need to implement the project. Now give the document a baseline status. Document the actual date your project activities are completed. If the actual completion date differs from your baseline date at anytime, you’ll still have documented the date it was supposed to be completed for historical purposes.
Things that you can include in your timeline are:
- A unique ID that your team can reference when giving an update
- The name of the task
- When the task should start
- When the task should finish
- The actual date the task was completed
- Any tasks that need to happen before other tasks can begin
- The owner of the task
- Percent complete of each task
It is completely possible to run a project without a project plan or timeline, but going with it makes a real difference. So, do yourself and your project team a favor… document milestones and important tasks, keep up with the status, and you’ll be that much closer to a well managed project.
