Using Tools, Templates, and Processes to Plan a Project

If you were able to do a project twice — once with a good plan and once with a poor or no plan — the project with the good plan would finish earlier, including the time spent planning. The project with a good plan has a higher probability of finishing than does the poorly planned project. The quality is better, the cost is less, and the list of benefits to good planning goes on. So why is planning often seen as not being real work? Figure 5-1 expresses my message clearer than mere words could.

Figure 5-1: Pain curves

“Pay me now or pay me later” applies equally well to the oil change commercial as it does to project planning. When the team and management are anxious for work to begin, it is difficult to focus on developing a solid plan of action before you are pressed into service. At times it would seem that the level of detail in the plan is overkill, but it is not. The project manager must resist the pressure to start project work and instead spend the time up front generating a detailed project plan. It has been demonstrated that a poor planning effort takes its toll later in the project as schedules slip, quality suffers, and expectations are not met.

The pain curve demonstrates that proper planning is painful but pays off in less pain later in the project. To not plan is to expose yourself to significant pain as the project proceeds. In fact, that pain usually continues to increase. It would continue to increase indefinitely except that someone usually pulls the plug on the project when the pain reaches unbearable levels.

The International Benchmark Council (it has gone out of business and as far as I know has not re-emerged or passed its research to another organization) provided the data from more than 5000 completed projects that generates these two curves. The project that uses good planning finishes 18–36 percent sooner than the poorly planned project, including the time spent planning. If you want to get your management's attention, show them this curve. The pain curve is a powerful attention getter, and I strongly recommend you use it. Once you've got senior management attention, show them the support you will need to plan your newly assigned project!

In this chapter, you learn all of the tools, templates, and processes that you will need to generate good project plans. All of the material presented here is directly applicable to the Linear PLMC model. The concepts are also adaptable to all of the models discussed in Part II and are discussed there. More specifically, in this chapter you learn about the following:

• Planning and running a Joint Project Planning Session (JPPS)
• The relationship between the RBS and the WBS
• Creating the WBS
• Techniques for estimating task duration, resource requirements, and cost
• Building the initial schedule
• Analyzing the initial schedule
• Schedule compression techniques
• Writing an effective project proposal
• Gaining approval of the project proposal