Project Planning

Business projects or large projects performed with a group often require project planning and management. This project planning begins with a thorough understanding of project specifications, breaking this specification into a number of tasks which need to be completed in order to meet the specification and then evaluating the amount of time it will take, assigning tasks and monitoring the progress. In this article we will examine these different steps and how you can be effective at project planning.

Project Planning Requires Understanding Project Specifications

Before any project begins a project specification needs to be drawn up by the people who want the project to be done. This project specification will be given to you as the project manager responsible for project planning and you will need to look at how you are going to fulfill the specification. It is important however to not just take the project specification at face value, you need to work together with the other people involved to ensure that you are all clear on what exactly the specification is saying and how you are going to go about achieving these specifications.

Tasks and Work Breakdown Structure

Once you are all clear on what the specification involves it is time to work out the tasks involved in the project and create the work breakdown structure. As the person responsible for project planning you are going to need to carefully go through the project specification and work out what tasks need to be accomplished to fulfill this project. You should also link these tasks so that you and your team can see how they are related to one another. This linking and writing down of the tasks is done in the work breakdown structure.

Project Planning and Task Assignment

Your work breakdown structure now shows you what tasks need to be done and how they will be related; the next step in project planning is to assign these different tasks to the people in your team. Assigning tasks to your team means looking at what skills and capabilities they have and how the tasks in the project can be used to enable your team to grow - giving them what they are capable of but stretching them slightly to improve these skills and abilities. Once you have decided who is going to do which tasks you can alter their description slightly in order to suit the person - for example, one member of your team may need their tasks broken down into smaller tasks in order to complete them; while another member may be given tasks that have been grouped together and worked as a unit.

Project Planning and Scheduling

Once you have your work breakdown structure and have assigned tasks to the different members of your team you should be able to get a good estimate of how long it is going to take you to complete the project. Work out how long each task is going to take each member of your team and how these are going to link together and then work out the total estimated length of the project. Allow a bit of room in your schedule for unforeseen circumstances and for some delays but try to be as accurate as possible.

Project Planning and Monitoring

Once you have completed the project planning and have started implementing the project you are going to need some way of monitoring the progress of the project. Monitoring the progress of a project can be done by setting up milestones in the project planning phase. Decide what specific and measurable milestones you would like to reach and when you would like to reach these milestones by. You should also put in place good communication systems so that you can always get the information you require about when these milestones are reached and how long it is going to take to reach the next milestone.

In conclusion, project planning is based around five main steps - specification clarification, creation of work breakdown structure and task listing, task assignment, scheduling and monitoring. Following these project management steps will allow you to effectively manage the project and ensure that the project is completed according to specifications and in a reasonable period of time.