Project Management Steps: A Guide to Project Planning

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Project planning principles can be applied to any endeavor: whether you are managing a project; launching a new business service or product; setting-up a new business; or just looking to managing yourself, or your team, better. I use these ideas for my corporate clients, and it works!!

The article features 4 Project Phases / Steps

Project Management Steps:

A Guide to Project Planning

The key to a successful project is in the planning. Creating a project plan is the first thing you should do when undertaking any kind of project, to save time, money and many other problems.

STEP 1: Project Goals

A project is successful when the needs of the stakeholders have been met. A stakeholder is anybody directly or indirectly impacted by the project.

As a first step, in the project governance process, it is important to identify the stakeholders in your project. It is not always easy to identify the stakeholders of a project, particularly those impacted indirectly.

Once you understand who the stakeholders are, the next step is to find out their needs. The next step is to prioritise them.

From the prioritised list, create a set of goals that can be easily measured. A technique for doing this is to review them against the SMART principle. This way it will be easy to know when a goal has been achieved.

Once you have established a clear set of goals, they should be recorded in the project plan.

It’s then time to move on and look at the project deliverables.

STEP 2: Project Deliverables

Using the goals you have defined in STEP 1, create a list of things the project needs to deliver in order to meet those project management steps goals. Specify when and how each item must be delivered.

Add the deliverables to the project plan with an estimated delivery date. More accurate delivery dates will be established during the scheduling phase, which is next.

STEP 3: Project Planning & Management

Create a list of tasks that need to be carried out for each deliverable identified in STEP 2. For each task identify the following:

• The amount of effort (hours or days) required to complete the task.
• The resource who will carry-out the task.

Once you have established the amount of effort for each task, you can work-out the effort required for each deliverable, and an accurate delivery date. Update your deliverables section with the more accurate delivery dates.

STEP 4: Supporting Plans

This section deals with plans you should create as part of the planning process. These can be included directly in the plan.

• Human Resource Plan
• Communications Plan
• Risk Management Plan

Risk management is an important part of the project management framework. Although often overlooked, it is important to identify as many risks to your project as possible, and be prepared if something bad happens.

Here are some examples of common project risks:

• Time and cost estimates too optimistic.
• Customer review and feedback cycle too slow.
• Unexpected budget cuts.
• Unclear roles and responsibilities.
• Stakeholder input is not sought, or their needs are not properly understood.
• Stakeholders changing requirements after the project has started.
• Stakeholders adding new requirements after the project has started.
• Poor communication resulting in misunderstandings, quality problems and rework.
• Lack of resource commitment.

Risks can be tracked using a simple risk log.

Congratulations. Having followed all the steps above, you should have a good project plan. Remember to update your plan as the project progresses, and measure progress against the plan.

Successful projects need good project management templates and methodology. Get yours with the SKM Project Management Steps program.

Sample Sheets/ Templates