Collaborative Project Planning Workshops

Governance Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)

John Bacon Project Manager /Agile Product Owner| Not Disclosed Fl, United States

I was looking at trying a new collaborative project planning technique by holding a 2-3 day workshop where the project team and other key stakeholders help by providing input into the various project planning artifacts produced in the planning phase of a project. Has anyone done these before and offer tips, advice, sample agendas?

Posted: May 4, 2019 2:08 PM

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Joseph Pangan Senior Principal Consultant| Genpact Philippines Angeles City, Philippines, Philippines

May 04, 2019 5:12 PM

Replying to Stéphane Parent

...

Those numbers are a bit small to have breakout sessions on specific sub-topics. Your best bet is to break it down to subsidiary management plans: scope management, quality management, schedule management... and so on.

Use each SMP's table of contents to further break down the content development.

I agree with Stéphane.

An Implementation Planning Study (IPS), that is what we call it in organizations I have been with.
To summarise, we set the agenda. The idea is to at least come with a baseline or the first iteration of the project plan (at least high level). The agenda may depend on what you think is important. We usually include the following topics in the agenda;
a. Project Governance and Resourcing
b. The scope/Product Scope/Project Scope: What is in and what is out
c. Methodologies
d. WBS
e. Dependencies
f. Scheduling
g. Testing
h. Quality assurance
i. Risks
j. etc., that you may think is important to come up with a baseline plan.

We then break the topics and schedule sessions. As the workshop may take time and so you could avoid people from losing interest, break and group the topics into sessions and invite only people relevant or interested to those topics in each scheduled session.

Posted: May 5, 2019 9:20 PM (Updated by author: May 5, 2019 9:22 PM)

Anton Oosthuizen Senior Business Analyst / Project Manager| Self Employed Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa

These types of workshops go by many names i.e planning sessions, kick off, etc. but regardless they can be very beneficial IF the purpose is understood. The primary objective is not to TALK but to DO. I found that there is normally to lack of talking and a lot is discussed and hashed out during these sessions but the execution falls flat. Typically the meat of such a session is to ensure everybody is on the same page regarding scope, the risks & assumptions, timelines, roles, approach, etc.

The one thing that is often overlooked but can be very helpful is to include somebody who was involved in a similar project to provide insights into lessons learned. But the most important thing about such a session is the outcome - an executable action plan that everybody can stick to. Without this, it was just a nice bitchin session.

I've never really agreed that these sessions are the place to formulate a detailed project schedule, it's more about milestone planning.

Posted: May 6, 2019 1:26 AM

Abolfazl Yousefi Darestani Manager, Quality and Continuous Improvement| Hörmann-TNR Industrial Doors Newmarket, Ontario, Canada

I did this long time ago.

Posted: May 6, 2019 7:57 AM

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