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Project Management
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8. Overview of Project Planning

bpayne and Adrienne Watt
After the project has been defined and the project team has been appointed, you are
ready to enter the second phase in the project management life cycle: the detailed
project planning phase.
Project planning is at the heart of the project life cycle, and tells everyone involved
where you’re going and how you’re going to get there. The planning phase is when
the project plans are documented, the project deliverables and requirements are
defined, and the project schedule is created. It involves creating a set of plans to help
guide your team through the implementation and closure phases of the project. The
plans created during this phase will help you manage time, cost, quality, changes, risk,
and related issues. They will also help you control staff and external suppliers to
ensure that you deliver the project on time, within budget, and within schedule.
The project planning phase is often the most challenging phase for a project manager,
as you need to make an educated guess about the staff, resources, and equipment
needed to complete your project. You may also need to plan your communications and
procurement activities, as well as contract any third-party suppliers.
The purpose of the project planning phase is to:
 Establish business requirements

 Establish cost, schedule, list of deliverables, and delivery dates
 Establish resources plans
 Obtain management approval and proceed to the next phase
The basic processes of project planning are:

 Scope planning – specifying the in-scope requirements for the project
to facilitate creating the work breakdown structure
 Preparation of the work breakdown structure – spelling out the breakdown of
the project into tasks and sub-tasks
 Project schedule development – listing the entire schedule of the activities and
detailing their sequence of implementation
 Resource planning – indicating who will do what work, at which time, and if
any special skills are needed to accomplish the project tasks
 Budget planning – specifying the budgeted cost to be incurred at the
completion of the project
 Procurement planning – focusing on vendors outside your company and
subcontracting
 Risk management – planning for possible risks and considering optional
contingency plans and mitigation strategies
 Quality planning – assessing quality criteria to be used for the project
 Communication planning – designing the communication strategy with all
project stakeholders
The planning phase refines the project’s objectives, which were gathered during the
initiation phase. It includes planning the steps necessary to meet those objectives by
further identifying the specific activities and resources required to complete the
project. Now that these objectives have been recognized, they must be clearly
articulated, detailing an in-depth scrutiny of each recognized objective. With such
scrutiny, our understanding of the objective may change. Often the very act of trying
to describe something precisely gives us a better understanding of what we are
looking at. This articulation serves as the basis for the development of requirements.
What this means is that after an objective has been clearly articulated, we can describe
it in concrete (measurable) terms and identify what we have to do to achieve it.
Obviously, if we do a poor job of articulating the objective, our requirements will be
misdirected and the resulting project will not represent the true need.
Users will often begin describing their objectives in qualitative language. The project
manager must work with the user to provide quantifiable definitions to those
qualitative terms. These quantifiable criteria include schedule, cost, and quality
measures. In the case of project objectives, these elements are used as measurements
to determine project satisfaction and successful completion. Subjective evaluations
are replaced by actual numeric attributes.
Example 1
A web user may ask for a fast system. The quantitative requirement should be all
screens must load in under three seconds. Describing the time limit during which the
screen must load is specific and tangible. For that reason, you’ll know that the
requirement has been successfully completed when the objective has been met.
Example 2
Let’s say that your company is going to produce a holiday batch of eggnog. Your
objective statement might be stated this way: Christmas Cheer, Inc. will produce two
million cases of holiday eggnog, to be shipped to our distributors by October 30, at a
total cost of $1.5 million or less. The objective criteria in this statement are clearly
stated and successful fulfillment can easily be measured. Stakeholders will know that
the objectives are met when the two million cases are produced and shipped by the
due date within the budget stated.
When articulating the project objectives you should follow the SMART rule:
 Specific – get into the details. Objectives should be specific and written in
clear, concise, and understandable terms.
 Measurable – use quantitative language. You need to know when you have
successfully completed the task.
 Acceptable – agreed with the stakeholders.
 Realistic – in terms of achievement. Objectives that are impossible to
accomplish are not realistic and not attainable. Objectives must be centered in
reality.
 Time based – deadlines not durations. Objectives should have a time frame
with an end date assigned to them.
If you follow these principles, you’ll be certain that your objectives meet the
quantifiable criteria needed to measure success.
Attribution
This chapter of Project Management is a derivative copy of Project Management by
Merrie Barron and Andrew Barron licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Unported
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8. Overview of Project Planning by bpayne and Adrienne Watt is licensed under a

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise
noted.
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8. Overview of Project Planning

The purpose of the project planning phase is to:

 Establish business requirements

The basic processes of project planning are:

8. Overview of Project Planning by bpayne and Adrienne Watt is licensed under a

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