Planning Done Right

The Planning Phase of any project is one of the most critical phases. It is where assumptions and estimates are made about what needs to be done, who will do it, and how long it will take. Dependencies and risk are factored into the development of the plan. With greater certainty we are able to develop a realistic plan. Conversely, with more uncertainty the less realistic the plan will be.

But, how much time, energy and money should we put into the planning phase? At what point do we achieve diminishing returns? At what point must we admit that we are at such a level of uncertainty that we cannot make realistic estimates?

Looking at the Project Management Lifecycle chart below (click to download) we see that the planning phase certainly contains a lot of activities and deliverables. The key defining activity that will give the best guidance to how much planning should be done up front is the WBS.

In our September Newsletter (Demystifying the WBS) we cautioned project planners who ask how much decomposition should go into the WBS to "Stop when it starts to get silly"! This supports our feeling that there are diminishing returns on planning and its OK to pause at the point of reasonable certainty in the planning process. We suggest following these 3 steps:

• Develop the WBS highest level to include all known scope
• Decompose WBS element a few levels down where a solid level of understanding and reasonable certainty exist
• Begin planning out those 'known' elements and reserve time in the near future to revisit and further elaborate and plan the rest as the picture becomes more clear

This approach is a bit agile-like because our goal is to deliver something useful more quickly and we acknowledge that the process will be somewhat iterative. While there is not bullet-proof metric to guide us on how much of a project needs to be fully planned before starting we would be comfortable having a solid plan for 25% of a projects duration. Thus, if we suspect a project is going to take 2 years to complete -- having the first 6 months planned out in detail should make us confident that we can begin the work.

It is important to understand, acknowledge and communicate to stakeholder that things will likely change! They always do. Our job is not to prevent change, but to adapt to it and deliver successful projects in an environment of constant change.

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Wishing you great project success !

President/CEO

Method123