Back To Basics – Project Management Guide – Project Planning Overview
Back To Basics – Project Management Guide – Project Planning Overview
This week we are going to kick off one more series of ‘Back To Basics’ articles that will cover the basic aspects of project planning – like project objective, requirements, deliverables, scheduling, risk planning, communication planning and many other aspects.
You can jump to Project Planning | Project Scope | Delivery Schedule Planning | Resource Planning | Cost Planning | Quality Planning | Risk Planning | Communication Planning parts of this series.
Introduction
Before commencement of any project, the first thing that we need to do is project planning. Any reasonable project manager certainly understands importance of planning a project well. Carefully planned project takes into account necessary aspects of a project (e.g. tasks, milestone, schedule, risks, communication, quality, etc.) and provide a plan which project team can refer during execution.
What is Project Planning?
The project planning is commonly perceived as creating ‘Gantt Chart‘ alone, that is not entirely correct. Gantt chart is merely visual representation of project schedule. In fact project plan is quite broader concept. A project plan expresses the objectives & requirements of the project in terms of
- Project Scope
- Project Schedule
- Resource Requirement
- project cost estimation
- Project Quality and
- Project Risk Management
A project planning enables project manager to translate project requirement into Work breakdown structure (WBS), tasks list, Gantt charts, resource assignment and risk register, etc.
Once project charter is approved, the project is formally initiated. Project planning activity can begin based on the project charter document, project requirement document.
Why do we need project planning?
You see, careful & detailed planning help us to reduces risk and in turn uncertainty in any given project. In meticulously planned project, project planner attempts to make a provision for potential occurrences of uncertainties in advance.
It is true that project plan in advance, cannot take care of all unforeseen events, risks, and deviations nevertheless; we still, are in a better position than having no planning. Why? – We know what needs to be done, we can organize our work and also, with well-planned project we can better equip ourselves to respond aptly to potential risks, slippages, etc. Hence the bottom line is, we are able to save on time, on resources and as a result we can save on cost too.
You can jump to Project Planning | Project Scope | Delivery Schedule Planning | Resource Planning | Cost Planning | Quality Planning | Risk Planning | Communication Planning parts of this series.
Additional readings about project management, leadership
- Avoid These 10 Most Common Mistakes That Leads to Project Failure
- Transition of A Good To Great Project Manager
- Looking for a robust task management software: Best of Both Worlds: Gantt Chart + Kanban Board?
- Project Management Tool for Software/ IT Projects
- 7 Reasons Why SMBs Prefer All In One Project Management Tool
Your life can be become easier with the right project management system. ZilicusPM is the right PM tool for you and your team. Get started now.
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Know more about project portfolio management, Gantt chart, best project management tool, project management office, project management tips, project planning guide, project risk management, project scope management, effective project management, project manager guides and know more about Project Portfolio Management Software, Project Management Software Guide.
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Using a project charter is such a benefit. As you can see in this post it gives you many advantages. Thank you for sharing!
I had considered this at one point, but I still think Basecamp is a bteter solution for client communication a couple of reasons (amongst others):The interface is simpler (for client and agency) The interface for Basecamp is very simple. Its a traditional message board when it boils down to it. The chunking of information and how its presented in digestible pieces makes bteter sense for a communication platform. The learning curve is very easy and that makes clients more willing to communicate with it.Basecamp is a creative oriented tool, LiquidPlanner is analytically oriented Where Basecamp falls short is in its project management offerings to-do lists and milestones. Its a communication platform built for creativity trying to be a project management platform two completely different mindsets that can never really merge. LiquidPlanner I believe is vice-versa, a project management platform trying to be a communication platform. There are some great communication implementations in LiquidPlanner, but overall, you can tell that that really wasn’t a strong point for the UX designers. The focus was on managing projects, analyzing them and creating reports where it should be.These are just a couple of the reasons why we still use Basecamp, the least of which being that we’ve also got a lot invested in it (as I mentioned in the article, we’ve been using it for quite a few years). I don’t believe that any one product out there is a magic bullet to serve as a solution to all your company’s management needs. Basecamp is really good at the things it was originally created to do bring clients and agencies together to communicate. LiquidPlanner is really good at what it was originally created to do organize projects and resources.