How-To: Write a Project Plan
If your company is growing and you are still executing projects
in an ad hoc manner, you might benefit from this article. It
suggests possible ways to plan and schedule projects. Project
planning can help make your employees more efficient. Instead
of each going off to do their own thing, a project schedule brings
people together. It is a rallying point of focus. Just
make sure the project plan serves your purposes rather than the
other way around. If you don't have a project management tool,
consider downloading Standard Time.
Who's Involved?
When you create your new project plan, first consider which
employees are involved. Since you probably have many
simultaneous projects, assign only those people to it who will be
active. This reduces the clutter. People only see the
project that are relevant to them. Later you'll schedule
project tasks to these people. Phases or Breakdowns
Does your project have natural phases? In other words, do you
have a long project that can be broken into more manageable pieces?
If so, you should consider creating those breakdowns now.
Standard Time calls these subsystems, while Microsoft Project calls
them summary tasks. They are really just headings for all the
real project tasks. They just help you collect work into
manageable areas. Once you create a few subsystems under your
project, you may find that even they can be broken down further.
So, you might consider creating subsystems under subsystems.
This breaks down the subsystem further. But watch out.
Don't create so many breakdowns that you stymie your employees.
Keep it simple. In man cases, one level of project breakdown
is enough. Keep your project plan easy to navigate. What
will employees do?
After laying out your major project breakdowns, the next step is to
create the actual tasks employees will do. These tasks will be
located under the project phases you created earlier. Each
phase may contain several tasks. Each task is unique. It
requires a certain amount of manpower to complete. We measure
that in hours, and call it Duration. In the beginning, this is
really just a forecast. You estimate how long the work will
take. Later, when the project schedule is shown in the
timesheet, you will collect actual work for each task. So, a
task has both forecasted work, and actual work. This tells you
the percent complete for each task, and ultimately for the entire
project. Optionally, you should consider scheduling each task to
start at a certain time. Don't get too rigid here, because
sometimes things change. Only schedule what you are certain
will happen as planned. Employees are resources
Now that you have a series of tasks under each project phase, it's
time to consider resource assignment, or resource scheduling.
This is simple. Its nothing more than the act of assigning
employees to tasks. That's it. You've probably already
been thinking along those lines. You know what each of your
resources is capable of. And, you know the tasks needed to
complete the project. So, match them up. Each task will
be assigned to one or more people. Why do this? Resource
scheduling has several benefits. First, it lets you find all
the tasks that a certain person is working on. When you sit
down with that person to discuss the project schedule, you can
quickly locate all his tasks. Next, it lets you find out if a
person has enough to work on, or too much. Timesheet
Employee timesheets should be limited to the projects they are
assigned to, and the tasks that are relevant to them at this time.
In other words, don't show them projects that they don't work on.
It only clutters things. Also, don't show tasks they aren't
assigned to, or aren't scheduled to work on. Keep the
timesheet as tight as possible. Get started!
Do you feel you have enough to get started? Are the concepts
clear? Standard Time offers the project management tools to
write a good project plan, but you'll need to work at it. It
takes time to get this right, but when you do, you'll become a
valuable asset to your company. Good luck!
Download Standard Time!
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