Why Project Planning is Overlooked
by Mark Phillips - August 29th, 2006Project planning is often taken for granted by people in charge of projects (in an everyday, business sense) -or by their bosses. They overlook the need develop a deliberate and disciplined approach to spelling out tasks, personnel and resources on a project by project basis.
This may come from a mix-up in the way people talk about planning and project plans.
There are two different ways of looking at project plans and the act of planning.
One is the view of traditionally trained project managers. These are people that likely manage large capital projects like designing airplanes, nuclear reactors and satellites.
These type of projects are about breaking new ground in terms deliverables or design and production methods. Personnel on these projects may have never worked with each other before. There are a lot of unknowns and the project itself is an exercise in uncovering unknowns and solving problems.
Planning, in this cases, is a necessary pre-condition for the project (and certainly for scheduling). It is a matter of defining deliverables, forecasting and preparing for unknowns and identifying risks which can endanger the project. To use a phrase from a recent post on Herding Cats, planning is the creation of the condition for success of the project.
The second way of looking at project planning is developing a plan to get things done. This is probably the way most people think of planning. In this, more common definition, the project’s goals are defined by the business goals of the organization. Its what you want to get done.
Projects, in this case, are about improving ongoing activities, getting things done better (not breaking new ground). Project management, then, is about gaining clarity and control of ongoing tasks using people that have mostly worked together before.
Here, a project plan is a schedule, the plan to things done. To quote Herding Cats, it is the mechanical production of the sequence of work efforts needed to implement the plan. Planning is the exercise of creating a schedule to get what needs to be done delivered.
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August 29th, 2006 at 3:19 pm
Mark,
One way to close the gap here (in understanding) is to “charter” the project through a Rsponsibility Assignment Matriix (RAM) with rows representing all the Project AND Team activities. The Project activitirs are the deliverables from the Statement of Work or other requirements documents. And the Team activities are defined through a variety of sources (PMBOK, OGC Project Maturity Model, CMMI SE/IPPD Process Areas). The Team Chartering defines the mututal accountabilities of the team members to each other. The Project Charter defines the acountabilitties between the team and the customer. From the Team Charter comes the need for a Plan and a Schedule to support the success of the Plan.
The RAM is a mechanism to “make public” these assignments and provides a reminder when we forget what we committed to. Great Blog.
November 14th, 2006 at 11:10 am
[…] The exact format in which the plan is written and recorded is less important than the process of planning the project and the act itself of going through project planning. Unfortunately, this how step of project planning is often overlooked. […]