The Master Plan

If you have spent time with enough good project managers, there is a good chance that you have heard of the 7 Ps. Starting as a British Army adage (according to Wikipedia), the 7 Ps stand for: Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance. This adage is often used in project management as well, and can easily explain why so many projects fail. The ultimate goal to success, then, is to create a solid project Master Plan!

Importance of Planning

In class today, we learned that the purpose of project planning is to guide project execution. Just as you likely would not walk out onto a football field in a middle of an intense Super Bowl game without a plan as the star quarterback, you should not begin executing a project as a project manager without an established plan as well. The results could be disastrous if you do! And as the 7 Ps suggest, without that planning, your project will likely be on the road to failure.

Become the Master Planner

Fortunately, project management offers many tools and templates to help towards the planning stage of a project. Today we learned about the Project Management Plan, which is a document used to coordinate all project planning documents and to help guide a project's execution and control. An example of a project planning document is the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), which is a foundation document that provides the basis for planning and managing the project's schedules, costs, resources, and changes. Coincidently, making a good Work Breakdown Structure is rather difficult. Therefore a project manager should use guidelines, or to use one of four key approaches: an analogy approach, a top-down approach, a bottom-up approach, or the mind-mapping approach. It is also useful to create a Work Breakdown Structure Dictionary, which is a supplementary document to help describe each WBS task in detail -- especially useful to those that may not be familiar with the project.

Just to name a few other areas that require good planning are time, stakeholders, communication, human resources, procurement, and risk. Skimping in any of these areas can undermine the project team's efforts, and really derail a project.