Begin Planning Phase
Understanding the Planning Phase Components
Benefits of project planning
Planning
helps you map out the full project
helps you understand the work needed to achieve your goals
helps coordinate efforts and timelines with other teams, contractors, and vendors
gives you time to identify and prepare for risks that could impact your project
gives you the chance to brainstorm ways to mitigate or address those risks
helps you get “buy-in” from key members of the project team
demonstrates to stakeholders that the team is taking care to start the project with a detailed plan
teamwork
Launching the planning phase
Project plans don’t have to be perfect the very first time. Even if you do a great job with your plans the first time around, it’s likely that the plan will change as the project evolves.
Big things are worked out during this stage
Schedule
Project timeline, which includes the start date, the end date, and dates for events in between.
Example
Assume that you are the lead project manager for project Plant Pals, a new service that will provide top clients with desk-friendly plants. You want to launch the service by the end of the year, so the planning phase for this effort should include a number of key dates. Those dates might include when you’ll request proposals from plant vendors. They might also include the date you’ll kick off with the web designers and developers who are creating a new website for the service. It should also include important dates during the project execution phase, like when the plants need to be ready for delivery or when the new webpage design needs to be approved, and you’ll need to include the target date for the launch of the service.
Budget
Account for the total cost to complete the project.
- Needs to be broken down to determine how much has to be spent on different elements of the project.
Example
For project Plant Pals, the budget will need to include items like the cost of designing and launching a webpage, the cost of hiring your plant vendor, and much more.
Risk management plan
Searching for possible problems and planning ahead to mitigate these risks
You’ll work with your team to consider answers to questions like
- Where might the schedule get off track?
- Where might the budget exceed your estimates?
and prepare a risk management plan based on whatever you discover.
Example
Let’s go back to the Office Green example. While putting together the initial schedule, you may realize that your estimates from your developers put you way beyond your launch date. To manage that risk, you might try to reduce or adjust the project’s scope to still meet your deadline or even negotiate a new launch date with your stakeholders.
Facilitating a project kick-off meeting
Project kick-off meeting: The first meeting in which a project team comes together to ground everyone in a shared vision, gain a shared understanding of the project’s goals and scope, and to understand each person’s individual roles within the team.
Who should be invited?
- The team members identified in a RACI chart chart, created during the initiation phase
- During the kickoff meeting, team members will learn more about how they’ll contribute to the project and how they’ll gain a deeper understanding of how the team will work together to reach the project’s goals.
- Project stakeholders and sponsor (so that they have a chance to understand the high-level plan for the project, can share their perspective, and you can ensure that everyone is on the same page. )
Why is a kick-off meeting important?
- When you’re kicking off a project, especially larger projects with multiple people involved, it’s important to get together to establish a shared vision, align on the scope, and build team rapport
- An opportunity for teammates to ask questions and offer insights
- A great time for you to set expectations with the team about how each person will individually contribute to the project
How to plan a kick-off meeting? (Agenda)
- Brief introductions (~ 10 mins)
- Everyone in the group introduce themselves and their roles
- If time allows, share a fun fact to help build team rapport
- Project background (~ 5 mins)
- How the project came to be
- Why the project matters
- Set a shared vision
- Goals and scope (~ 5 mins)
- In-scope
- Out-of-scope
- Target launch date
- Milestones
- Roles (~ 5 mins)
- Make sure that everyone is clear on what work they’ll be responsible for throughout the duration of the project.
- Collaboration (~ 10 mins)
- Shared project tools and documents
- Communication expectations
- What comes next (~ 10 mins)
- Set expectations with your teammates for what’s coming up
- Question round (~ 15 mins)
- Gain clarity on meeting topics
- Hear from the team and ensure that the project is benefiting from diversity of thoughts, experiences, and ideass
Once you’ve finalized the meeting agenda, document this information into a meeting agenda template, and send it to attendees a day or two ahead of the meeting.
Best practivce
Set the right time.
Choose a meeting time that works for everyone. Be mindful of time zone differences.
Set the right length.
Choose an appropriate meeting lengthâno more than one hour. You donât want to waste peopleâs time, but you also donât want to run out of time. Kick-off meetings work best when you first share key information and then spend any additional time on questions and team building.
Invite the right people.
Be strategic about including the appropriate people. The goal is to invite attendees who play a role in the development and execution of the project, such as all team members, stakeholders, and the project sponsor. You donât want to leave anyone out, but you also donât want to invite people who shouldnât be there.
Designate a notetaker.
The discussion that takes place during the meeting is important. It is critical that you document any feedback, changes, or questions asked by attendees. If you are leading the meeting, designate someone else to take notes before the meeting starts. You can also use tools like Chorus Notetaker, Google Keep, Google Docs, or Microsoft OneNote.
Set the agenda.
To recap what we discussed in the video, a kick-off meeting agenda should generally include: introductions, the project background and purpose, project goals and scope, roles and responsibilities, the collaboration process and project tools, what comes next (expectations and action items), and time for questions and discussion.
Share the agenda.
Prior to the meeting, share the agenda with attendees via email and identify speakers for each topic. By sending the agenda in advance, everyone will have an idea of what to expect, time to prepare for anything they may need to present or discuss, and time to generate questions or ideas.
Stick to the agenda.
During meetings, discussions can sometimes go off topic or take longer than expected. As a project manager, it is your job to keep the meeting on track by redirecting discussions to the items on the agenda.
Follow up after the meeting.
After the meeting, make sure to send out a meeting summary featuring the meeting notes and any action items. In the follow-up email, also invite attendees to reach out if they have any additional questions.
Defining Tasks and Milestones
Understanding tasks andmilestones
Milestone: An important point within the project schedule that indicates progress and usually signifies the completion of a deliverable or phase of the project.
- Significant checkpoints in the project
- Keeping track of them helps ensure that your project is on schedule to meet its goals
Task: An activity that needs to be accomplished within a set period of time
The work of a project is broken down into many different tasks. In order to reach a milestone, you and your team must complete multiple tasks.
Example: If a milestone is completing the first draft of a report, the tasks required to get to that milestone might include hiring a writer, conducting research, and drafting different sections of the report.
The importance of setting milestones
Setting milestones gives you a clear understanding of the amount of work your project will require.
- The act of setting milestones forces you to break your project down into more manageable chunks.
- The further you go, the better you’ll be able to see how much work will be needed to meet the project goals.
Milestones can help keep your project on track.
- When you set a milestone, you assign clear deadlines for when certain project deliverables need to be completed.
- As you work through the execution phase, you can look back at these deadlines to make sure that the project is progressing at the right pace
Milestones help you uncover areas where you might need to adjust scope, timelines, or resources to meet your goals.
Reaching milestones can seriously motivate your team and illustrate real progress to your stakeholders
- Milestones serve as a great check-in point to highlight your progress to stakeholders. It gives them the opportunity to see the work that’s been completed so far and lets them see everything is on track and up to their standards.
Milestones must be completed on time and in sequential order.
How to set milestones?
Evaluate the project as a whole -> It helps to refer back to your project charter to remind yourself of the project goal.
Make a list of what the team needs to do to achieve the goal
- The big items that indicate progress are your milestones, which are the key points within the project schedule that signify the completion of a project deliverable or a phase in the project.
- Smaller items, like any item that a stakeholder wouldn’t need to review, for example, are tasks. You’ll plan for these once you’ve separated them out from the milestones.
Once you’ve determined your milestones, assign each one a deadline.
To make sure you give your team a fair amount of time to complete each of those tasks, you’ll need to space your milestones out accordingly.
To get a good sense of timing, you can connect with teammates to discuss the tasks required to reach each milestone and get their estimates for how long these tasks will take.
When determining deadlines for milestones, also consider the needs of the stakeholders.
Best practices
Set tasks to identify milestones
- Top-down scheduling The project manager lays out the higher-level milestones, then works to break down the effort into project tasks. The project manager works with their team to ensure that all tasks are captured.
- Bottom-up scheduling The project manager looks at all of the individual tasks that need to be completed and then rolls those tasks into manageable chunks that lead to a milestone.
Integrate milestones into your project schedule Try to set milestones for the most important events in your project. Review your project schedule and identify important moments or checkpoints.
Milestone-setting pitfalls
- Donât set too many milestones.
- When there are too many milestones, their importance is downplayed
- If milestones are too small or too specific, you may end up with too many, making the project look much bigger than it really is to your team and stakeholders.
- Donât mistake tasks for milestones.
- Remember that milestones should represent moments in time, and in order to map out how you will get to those moments, you need to assign smaller tasks to each milestone.
- Donât list your milestones and tasks separately.
- Make sure that tasks and milestones can be visualized together in one place, such as a project plan. This will help ensure that you are hitting your deadlines and milestones.
Creating a work breakdown structure
Work Breakdown Structure (WBS): A tool that sorts the milestones and tasks of a project in a hierarchy, in the order they need to be completed.
- It helps break down the sometimes intimidating challenges of a project into more manageable chunks.
One common way to create a WBS is to create a tree diagram of project tasks.
Example
while creating a work breakdown structure is a helpful exercise for visualizing the tasks of the project, you would NOT typically include this type of diagram in your official project plan. Instead, you’d input the tasks identified through this exercise into a spreadsheet or your chosen work management software, where you can more easily assign owners to each task.
After completing a work breakdown structure, you should have
- A set of discrete project tasks that ladder up to each of your milestones You and your teammates will know exactly what needs to happen to reach your first milestone and the milestones after that.
- Team members assigned to each task
- Each person should have a clear understanding of the tasks they own and the order in which they need to complete them.
- Tasks are typically assigned according to a person’s role in the project.
- To assign tasks between two or more team members with the same roles, you might take into consideration each person’s familiarity with the tasks at hand.
- When assigning tasks, you should also consider each teammate’s workload and keep everyone’s workloads balanced. Make sure that a single teammate isn’t assigned more work than others.
Steps to build a WBS
- Start with the high-level, overarching project picture. Brainstorm with your team to list the major deliverables and milestones.
- Identify the tasks that need to be performed in order to meet those milestones.
- Examine those tasks and break them down further into sub-tasks.