3.8. Planning Phase

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 schedule.

The project planning phase is often the most challenging phase for a project manager, as they need to make an educated guess about the staff, resources, and equipment needed to complete your project. 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

Merriam-Webster’s definition of planning is “the act or process of making a plan to achieve or do something.” This suggests that the ultimate goal of planning is the plan itself. It also presumes that once a plan has been formulated, you only need to follow the plan to achieve the desired outcome. That’s fine for ordinary conversation. But when we begin to think about living order project planning, a more expansive understanding of the nature of planning emerges. In living order, planning is a process that prepares the project team to respond to events as they actually unfold. The whole point of planning is to develop strategies to manage the:

• Changes to scope
• Schedule
• Cost
• Quality
• Resources
• Communication
• Risk
• Procurement
• Stakeholder engagement

A plan is a strategic framework for the scheduling and execution of a project. It’s only useful if it includes the information team members require to begin moving forward. And it only remains useful if team members modify the plan as they learn the following about the project:

• Key constraints such as the timeline, cost, and functional requirements.
• Information on project system issues, such as workflow and milestones, provides a broad look at the project as a whole.
• Plans for periodic check-ins that allow participants and leadership to re-evaluate the project and its original assumptions

“3.3. Planning” from Essentials of Project Management by Adam Farag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. Modifications: moved from Chapter 3

“Plans” by Undraw, Undraw License