Marie ChristianAVP, Actuarial Global Casualty—Foreign| ChubbPhiladelphia, United States
Hi, I’m a grad student at Drexel University studying Project Management and looking to learn from PMs. Quick question: What percentage of a project’s effort do you dedicate to planning, and why is it so important?
A brief reply with your perspective or a real-world example would help me understand the importance of planning for experienced professionals like you.
You'll find that the most common response to PM questions which don't have sufficient context is "it depends" :-)
The complexity of the project, how unique it is relative to what has been done before, its size, scale, duration and other factors will affect how much planning is done and over whether that planning is mostly front loaded or spread evenly over the life of the project.
For example, if I work for a small software company which does mostly cookie-cutter implementations of our cloud-based software, planning might represent a very small percentage of the overall project effort. On the other hand, if my team has been commissioned to demolish a high rise building in the middle of a busy downtown area, a significant amount of effort might be spent in planning the work.
Kiron Saving Changes...
Luis BrancoCEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, LdªCarcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
Great question, and very well framed.
In practice, the percentage of effort dedicated to planning varies widely with context. In simple, repeatable projects it may be around 10–15%. In complex, novel, or high-impact projects, it can easily reach 25–30%.
The key point, however, is not the percentage but the quality of the planning. Good planning creates shared understanding, reduces avoidable uncertainty, and enables conscious decision-making before the cost of change escalates.
In the real world, plans are rarely followed exactly. But when planning is done well, adaptations during execution are faster, better informed, and more responsible. Planning is not about predicting everything in advance; it is about creating enough clarity to make good decisions under uncertainty and to adjust intelligently as the project learns. Saving Changes...
As much as allowed, as little as possible, whenever it's necessary.
In the organizations I've been in, there's been downward pressure to execute. Sometimes you can push the boundaries, sometimes you just get started and learn as you go. That is an oversimplification - the type of work, risks, and constraints play a large role in determining how much planning to do, when.
At a prior employer, when we were upgrading our legacy ERP, the system was so out of date that we started with planning how to perform the upgrade then running it in a test environment in order to find bugs and identify the impact of deprecated code. Once we understood that, we were able to plan the actual upgrade, deployment, and end user training.
When we were deploying SAP to one of our foreign markets, we used rolling wave planning. While work was being performed to deploy one module, we were planning the deployment for the next module.
On many projects you learn new things as you go, so even during execution you can still be planning in response to changes. Then, at the end, you have to actually plan the deployment. For some projects this can be really simple and not require much more than a few emails. And then there are projects where you are deploying across multiple time zones, with teams in each time zone - you have to include testing in the plan to make sure everything works, and you need a rollback plan in case of catastrophic failure, including a decision point for whether rollback is needed and a decision point for a point of no return where you go forward no matter what.
At a high level, the purpose of planning is to be able to execute well. However, there's more to it than that. As project managers our focus is often on planning for execution and delivery. But, why are we executing and delivering? There needs to be a larger plan (although not a "project" plan) that informs the what and the why - the purpose for the project in the first place. I'm sure many of us have managed what could be called "pet" projects - activities that didn't move the strategic needle or contribute to operational excellence. When the project team and those receiving the deliverables understand the what and the why, and it's not a pet project, both quality and adoption of the deliverables are likely to increase. Saving Changes...
Program Manager| HARPER SRLSanto Domingo / Distrito Nacional, Dominican Republic
Planning usually takes 15–30% of the total project effort. It’s important because planning is where you reduce uncertainty, align stakeholders, and surface risks early. Time invested upfront saves much more time later in rework, misalignment, and crisis management. I’ve seen projects “move fast” with little planning, and they almost always pay for it downstream. Planning is about enabling better execution. Saving Changes...
Senior Projects Manager | Field & Marten AssociatesNew Westminster, British Columbia, Canada
Marie, I work in the real estate development and construction industry. We dedicate a significant portion of our effort to planning because we use a hybrid project management approach. While construction execution itself is largely predictive, the development and preconstruction phases lean more toward Agile due to evolving scope, stakeholder input, and risk considerations.
Overall, I would estimate that roughly 60% of our project effort is spent on planning. This includes risk identification and mitigation, cost and schedule controls, coordination with consultants and contractors, and scenario analysis. Investing heavily in planning allows us to surface issues early, align stakeholders, and reduce costly changes during construction, where adjustments are far more expensive and disruptive.
In my experience, strong upfront planning directly translates to smoother execution, better cost control, and improved project outcomes but this can be different from one industry to another.
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