How to properly write out a project management plan?

What is the project man­age­ment plan?

1. Basic — approved by the lead­er­ship (cus­tomer). It is deter­mined by the suc­cess of the com­ple­tion of the tasks that are con­trolled by tim­ing and quality.
2. Work­ing — unlike the pre­vi­ous one, the project man­ag­er makes changes accord­ing to the new infor­ma­tion or tasks.

A good project man­age­ment plan should answer the basic questions:

• Why? — What prob­lem the project solves and what’s its val­ue? Why the project is sponsored? 
• What? — What are the main prod­ucts (deliv­ery) of the project? What needs to be done for the suc­cess­ful completion?
• Who? — Whom to bring to work on the project and for what each of the par­tic­i­pants will be respon­si­ble? In what for­mat will they be organized? 
• When? — What are the time frame of the project? When will the key moments/​milestones be fulfilled?

1. The coor­di­na­tion of par­tic­i­pants’ actions — these include not only the project team direct­ly but also stake­hold­ers. The larg­er the project, the more dif­fi­cult it is to estab­lish a work­flow process.
2. Track­ing the sta­tus of the project imple­men­ta­tion — if the tra­di­tion­al man­age­ment has a rigid sequence of steps, the project man­age­ment increas­ing­ly uses vari­eties of Agile-mod­el where the project is divid­ed into small work­ing pieces.
3. A clear under­stand­ing of one’s role in the project — this, by the way, what pro­gram­mer Rick fromthe viral article“We fired our top tal­ent. Best deci­sion we ever made” was lacking.
4. Search­ing prob­lem­at­ic areas of the project before the phase of the active devel­op­ment — long-term projects suf­fer the most from such ​“sores”. In the Agilecon­cept, the prob­lem is par­tial­ly solved by con­stant test­ing and search­ing for vul­ner­a­ble places for fur­ther corrections.

In the Work­sec­tion, Gantt chart allows to see the dif­fer­ence between the basic and the work­ing plan (blue — the total time, red — over­due tasks, green — tasks com­plet­ed on time)

Devel­op­ing a project man­age­ment plan

We have designed a sim­ple step-by-step pro­ce­dure for writ­ing the plan, con­sist­ing of 16 items:

1. Deter­mine the start­ing con­di­tions to devel­op a plan- it is impor­tant to under­stand, with whom you will devel­op it (by your­self, with the par­tic­i­pa­tion of the lead­er­ship, stake­hold­ers), where and when, and so on. It is essen­tial to pre­scribe meth­ods (for exam­ple, brain­storm­ing) and soft­ware (such as Microsoft Visu­al Stu­dio), which will be used in the cre­ation of the plan — this sig­nif­i­cant­ly saves time and sim­pli­fy the task.
2. Deter­mine the ini­tial con­di­tions of the project — the part that describes the con­tent of the draft, the list of require­ments to the results and its man­age­ment. For exam­ple, the project was con­ceived for the sale of high-qual­i­ty neon fid­get spin­ners with he images of super­heroes. As a result of the suc­cess­ful imple­men­ta­tion of the annu­al project, there should be 100,000 units of goods sold with­in 12 months from the start of the project, then the busi­ness will be sold. The struc­ture of the project man­age­ment will con­sist of the project man­ag­er in the cen­tral office and the rel­e­vant depart­ments in the region­al offices of the project.
3. Divide actions per­formed into such that will be per­formed by the project team and outsourcing.
4. Cre­ate a project WBS, break­ing it down into small­er man­age­able­pieces. This is sim­i­lar to the agile approach, when the full code is divid­ed intomany small pieces of work.
5. Set a series of tasks for each part of the WBS and build the rela­tion­ship­be­tween them. This way the task of pur­chase and con­struc­tion of a region­al­ware­house for the stor­age of fid­get spin­ners can only be per­formed after the analy­sis of the mar­ket and the sale of a cer­tain quan­ti­ty in a par­tic­u­lar area.
6. Iden­ti­fy the nec­es­sary com­pe­tences to per­form each task. Here it is impor­tant not to fit the required knowl­edge and skills to poten­tial par­tic­i­pants of the project but focus on the ​“ide­al” requirements.
7. Esti­mate the time and mon­ey to per­form tasks.
8. Devel­op the crit­i­cal path­pro­ject. Tech­nique is good just for the gro­cery­busi­ness, and it is easy to dis­play through the scheme (for exam­ple, the Ganttchart).
9. Cre­ate a cal­en­dar plan for the project — pri­ma­ry, inter­me­di­ate, final dates. For exam­ple, a sim­pli­fied dia­gram: Novem­ber 1, start the project, Decem­ber 1 — start­the sales for the New Year, Decem­ber 31 — sum­ming up the Christ­mas sales,January 15 — spe­cial prod­uct launch for the St. Valen­tine’s Day, Feb­ru­ary 20 — sum­ming up and so on.
10. Cal­cu­late the cost of the project (in our case, how much will it cost to suc­cess­ful­ly sell 100,000 fid­get spin­ners and then sell the business).
11. Spec­i­fy qual­i­ty require­ments (for exam­ple, the pre­scribed stan­dards of qual­i­ty work­man­ship for fid­get spinners).
12. Assign respon­si­bil­i­ty to spe­cif­ic peo­ple on the task. This is where item 6 comes in handy, whose list will serve to bind the com­pe­tence of team members.
13. Plan the for­mat of work with stake­hold­ers — find the chan­nels of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, deter­mine the degree of their involve­ment in the project, and soon.
14. Cal­cu­late the risks (for exam­ple, the for­mu­la of the cumu­la­tive method). In our exam­ple with fid­get spin­ners, this can be a sim­ple mar­ket glut, a vio­la­tion of the terms and con­di­tions of freight for­warders, etc. In the analy­sis of the risks, use data from the pre­ced­ing items.
15. Note the lim­i­ta­tions of a project to make cor­rec­tions to the pro­jec man­age­ment plan. In our case, the parts of the fid­get spin­ners are deliv­ered from Chi­na, assem­bly occurs in Ukraine, and it already lim­its the abil­i­ty to con­trol the qual­i­ty of the mate­ri­als and quick conversion.
16. Go through all the items of the plan again in order to achieve Zen. What’s left is to final­ize is the pro­cure­ment list and its require­ments, run by stake­hold­ers — and you have a ready-to-go project man­age­ment plan.

The approval of a project man­age­ment plan

In the ​“Stop pay­ing for every­thing” book, Vladislav Gagarsky sets the fol­low­ing approval scheme as an example:

1. The team lead­ers send a joint­ly devel­oped plan to the project manager.
2. The leader approves the project man­age­ment plan or, in case of errors,
3. The project leader sends the approved plan to the lead­ers of the project teams for fur­ther implementation.

Tips on how to cre­ate a project man­age­ment plan:

• write out the plan in the mate­r­i­al form — it does­n’t mat­ter whether it will be doneon paper or using a spe­cial soft­ware. Even the small­est nuance should be spelled­out, oth­er­wise, wait for prob­lems with com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the par­tic­i­pantsand stakeholders.
• attract stake­hold­ers to the plan cre­ation — estab­lish­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion with them, you will avoid prob­lems with the for­mu­la­tion of a shared vision of the project and the expect­ed results.
• orga­nize your doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem — projects gen­er­ate a huge num­ber of doc­u­ments: the pri­ma­ry con­cepts, ideas, designs, pre­sen­ta­tions, risk man­age­ment plans, the dia­gram of the crit­i­cal path, and so on. They fall into the basic and work­ing plans for the man­age­ment of the project. For easy access and fast imple­men­ta­tion, there should be a clear sys­tem of the documents.
• explore the details before devel­op­ing a plan — to para­phrase Ostap Ben­der’s from the famous ​“The Twelve Chairs”: ​“In the morn­ing — research, in the evening — plan. Or plan in the evening, research in the morn­ing”. Learn expec­ta­tions of cus­tomers, par­tic­i­pants of the project, expect­ed project objec­tives, tech­niques that are worth to apply when devel­op­ing a project man­age­ment plan. This pre­lim­i­nary work will reduce time costs and, most impor­tant­ly, will min­i­mize the num­ber of errors in the project man­age­ment plan.
• talk with the team before the start — this way you will have updat­ed knowl­edge about the com­pe­ten­cies of employ­ees and see if there is inter­est in the future project. No won­der the fol­low­ing is of the prin­ci­ples of Agile-Man­i­festo: ​“Project work should be done by moti­vat­ed pro­fes­sion­als. In order for work to be com­plet­ed… trust them”.

The ver­dict

Project man­age­ment plan is not your mag­ic wand.