Planning for Fun

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Estimating   Schedule Management   Scheduling   Scope Management   Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)  

Yes, I know…planning is boring! As project managers, we are biologically programmed to groan whenever the thought of planning a new project comes up, so why the heck should I expect you to want to read an article all about planning?

I could go for the sympathy angle (“Heck, I had to write it! All you have to do is read it…”), but even I am not that desperate for readers, so instead let me try this--I’ll make this as interesting as I possibly can, maybe even (gasp) enjoyable! Maybe that’s a stretch, but you’ve got this, far so let’s try. Planning is critical to the success of the project, but it can be so mind numbingly boring that everyone involved in the process just wants to get it over with, and that’s not conducive to a successful outcome.

The basics
There are some inescapable truths about planning. It is necessary to plan each project element as thoroughly as possible if we are going to build an accurate, manageable project plan. First off, we have to understand what is involved in the project plan, and I like to think of two major categories:

• The project schedule--the traditional concept of planning that consists of the work breakdown structure, the resource assignments, the dependencies and of course the effort and duration estimates
• The category plans--all of the support plans that help …

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