Planning Defined

Planning is quite simply answering the questions shown in Figure 3-2. They may be called the “Who, What, When, Why, How Much, How Long?” questions that you learned if you ever studied interviewing methods. It is that simple. And it is that hard. I say hard because answering some of these questions requires a crystal ball—especially questions like “How long will that take?” On tasks for which no history is available, this is a very hard question to answer. As my engineer said, “You can’t schedule creativity.”

Strategy, Tactics, and Logistics

To plan a project properly, you must attend to three kinds of activities that may have to be performed during the life of the job. These are strategy, tactics, and logistics.

Strategy refers to the overall method you will employ to do the job, sometimes referred to as a “game plan.” As I related in Chapter 1, for thousands of years boats have been built with the keel down so that when one wishes to put the boat in the water, it is already right side up. This method worked fine until the 1940s, when World War II placed tremendous pressure on shipyards to build military ships faster, and ships were being built out of steel plate, rather than wood. Shipbuilders quickly found that it was extremely difficult to weld in the keel area. From the outside, you had problems getting under the ship, and inside you had to stand on your head to weld.

Avondale shipyards decided that it would be easier to build steel boats if they built them upside down. The welding in the keel area now could be done from outside, standing above the ship, and to work on the inside one could stand upright. This strategy proved so effective that Avondale could build boats faster, cheaper, and of higher quality than its competitors, and the approach is still being used today.

Too often planners choose a project strategy because “it has always been done that way,” rather than because it is best. You should always ask yourself, “What would be the best way to go about this?” before you proceed to do detailed implementation planning.

Implementation Planning

Once you have decided to build boats upside down, you must work out all of the details of how it will be done. Sometimes we say that we must be sure to dot all of the “i’s” and cross all the “t’s.” This is where you answer those “who, what, when, and where” questions. In fact, it is implementation planning that many people think of when they talk about planning. However, a well-developed implementation plan for the wrong project strategy can only help you fail more efficiently.

Logistics

Military people can quickly tell you the benefit of attention to logistics. You can’t fight a battle if people have no ammunition, food, clothing, or transportation. It is logistics that attends to these things. I once saw a project scheduling program (regrettably now defunct) that allowed construction managers to record when a certain quantity of bricks was delivered to their site; it then showed when they would run out, given a specific utilization rate. This would alert managers to schedule delivery of a new supply just before the existing stock was depleted.

I was also told about a road construction project in India that had very bad living conditions for the workers. The food was bad, sleeping conditions were poor, and the workers were suffering low morale. The project manager and his staff were all staying in a nice hotel in the nearby city. They finally realized the problem and moved to the site with the workers. Living conditions immediately improved, and so did worker morale. This is an example of the importance of a peripheral aspect of logistics.

Plan Ingredients

Following are the minimum ingredients that should be contained in a project plan. It is a good idea to keep these in a loose-leaf notebook. Initially, the notebook will contain only the plan. As the project is managed, reports, changes, and other documents will be added, so that when the project is completed the notebook will contain a complete history of the project, which can be used by others as data for planning and managing their own projects.

A suggestion here—until recent years, project notebooks have been the only way to completely document a project. With the advent of good personal computer databases, I suggest that the notebook be backed up with electronic data. It is very difficult to locate data in a notebook. Transferring information to a computer database makes it much easier to access. This may be the only device used a few years from now.

In any case, here are the items that make up the project plan:

• Problem statement.

• Project mission statement (see chapter 3 for instructions on how to develop a mission statement).

• Project objectives (see chapter 3).

• Project work requirements, including a list of all deliverables, such as reports, hardware, software, and so on. It is a good idea to have a deliverable at each major project milestone so that progress can be measured more easily.

• Exit criteria. Each milestone should have criteria established that will be used to determine whether the preceding phase of work is actually finished. If no deliverable is provided at a milestone, then exit criteria become very important.

• End-item specifications to be met: This means engineering specifications, architectural specs, building codes, government regulations, and so on.

• Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). This is an identification of all of the tasks that must be performed in order to achieve project objectives. A WBS is also a good graphic portrayal of project scope (see chapter 6).

• Schedules (both milestone and working schedules should be provided; see chapters 6 and 7).

• Required resources (people, equipment, materials, and facilities). These must be specified in conjunction with the schedule (see chapters 5 and 6).

• Control system (see chapters 8 and 9).

• Major contributors. Use a Linear Responsibility Chart for this (see chapter 5).

• Risk areas with contingencies when possible (see chapter 3).