Chapter 22
Ten Tips for Effective Planning
In This Chapter
Good planning pays for itself
When do you prefer to find the problems?
Tips for effective planning
Inadequate planning, or no planning at all, is a well-known source of project problems. Hardly surprising is it? Just about everyone, apart from some senior organisational managers that is, realise that if you want something to go well then you have to plan it, whether it’s a holiday, a wedding or a business critical project.
You don’t just want any plan though; you want a good one. This chapter gives some tips to help you get the plan right. And if the plan’s right, then your project is going to be a whole lot easier to manage.
Balancing the Plans
At the start of this chapter I pointed out the problem of inadequate planning as a well-known source of project problems. Actually it’s often the cause of complete project failure. However, the answer to under-planning isn’t over-planning, it’s correct planning.
Over-planning hits you twice. First, it takes you more time and effort than necessary to do the planning in the first place. Second, you now have to maintain those plans throughout the project and so you’ll use up even more time and resource unnecessarily. Unless you like doing unnecessary work for the sheer joy of it, over-planning isn’t a very clever option.
When you are thinking about the Planning Stage of a project, one of the first things you have to do is decide how much planning you’ll need. In turn, that will depend on the characteristics of the project and how much control you’re going to have to exercise. The more control you want, the better the plan you’ll need for that control, and the higher the cost. If you need less control, you won’t need such detailed plans, and the time and cost of planning will be less.
The degree of planning needed this time around should be agreed between the Project Manager and the Project Steering Group (PSG). The PSG is responsible for the overall governance of the project, so the decision must involve PSG members as well as the Project Manager.
Using Planning Levels
Many project approaches have different levels of planning, and those levels are not there by accident; they’re logical. You start with planning at the high, project, level. In your Project Plan you set down the entire project from start to finish – if you know what the finish is, which normally you will. Then, as you approach each stage, you develop a more detailed Stage Plan. If any Work Packages (work assignments) are complex, then it may be necessary to go to a third level of planning for at least some of them.
Don’t get sucked down into the fine detail when you are looking at the whole project – and it happens so, so easily. Unless you have overwhelming reasons not to, stick to the high level with the Project Plan and leave the detail for the Stage Planning.
Using Stage Plans
Okay, the last section mentioned Stage Plans so why a second one? Well, it’s important to understand the disadvantage of planning the whole project in fine detail at the start. Unless your project is very short, things are going to change while the project is underway. The organisation changes, requirements change, priorities change, technology changes and anyway you find out more about what you are dealing with as the project work progresses.
If you plan the whole project in fine detail at the beginning, you’re going to be wasting your time because by the time you get into the project those plans will be out of date. With the stage planning approach you do the more detailed Stage Plan towards the end of the previous stage, based on the very latest information, so it’s bang up to date. You then update the Project Plan with the latest information from the new Stage Plan.
Keep your brain switched on because there are always times when you need to break the ‘rules’. In some projects it’s necessary to plan the whole thing in detail at the start. An example is a film shoot where scenes are shot in location order, not in the chronological order in which they will appear in the movie. In that case you need everything mapped out at the start and you need to know at the start exactly how it’s all going to turn out. That sort of project is relatively rare though, and certainly for just about all business projects you’ll find the project and stage planning approach to be logical and productive.
Basing Planning on Products
For each level of plan, start with products – what you need to produce. The normal way people approach project planning is to start thinking about the activities. Most of the major computer tools start at that point too and it feels good when you use them because it aligns with how you think. When you start a project, you start thinking ‘I must do that, and this, and I mustn’t forget to do that’ – do, do, do. That starting point may be comfortable and even natural, but it isn’t logical. How can you determine activities and estimate time durations if you’re not clear what it is you have to produce? For example, how long does it take to build a wall, and what are the activities involved? Precise answer now, please.
Rather than activities springing to mind along with timescales, you’ve probably got questions. ‘How long is the wall?’ ‘Does it include the foundations?’ ‘How high is the wall, because I may need scaffolding?’ If questions like that did spring into your mind, then you’re convinced. Start with what you need to produce, not with the activities.
Consulting Others
Unless you’re very experienced in the project subject area you can’t produce plans for the project in isolation. You’ll need to consult others to determine what’s involved in terms of products, activities and resource. There’s no shame in that, so don’t be shy about involving others. Your skill is in running projects not in being a subject expert in every project area you deal with.
Even if you do know the project area, it still pays to involve others as a cross check. You’ll also get ‘buy-in’ from potential Team Leaders and project specialists if you involve them in the planning at the outset.
Working Hard At Estimates
Accurate estimation is at the heart of a good plan. It takes effort though, and that’s in two dimensions. First, if you have limited experience, you have to think very carefully when it comes to the estimates and perhaps talk to other people who have done this stuff before. Second, make the effort to keep historic metrics from projects in a form that can be used in future projects.
You’ll find more help on estimating in the next chapter, Ten Tips for Estimating. You’ll never get your estimates exactly right, but the closer in you can get, the more the project will track to the plan and the easier it will be to manage.
Being Brutally Realistic
Following on from the last section, a problem with a lot of project planners is that they play games. Not you though; you want to be professional or you wouldn’t have bought this book. That professionalism includes being brutally realistic when it comes to estimating activity durations in the project. If your project is going to take 15 months but the bosses say it must be done in 10, then of course the answer isn’t to reduce all of the estimates by a third. The work hasn’t reduced and all that will happen is that you’ll be late.
Be absolutely realistic with estimates. If the project won’t fit the required end date, work at the plans until it will. Have a look at the ‘Four Dogs’ model in Chapter 8 (illustrated at the start of Part II) to get the project ‘canvas’ into the right tension.
In Project Management for Dummies Stanley Portny advises ‘Don’t back into your plan.’ By that he means don’t massage the figures to fit the constraints. It’s very good advice.
Levelling the Resource
Resource levelling can take a long time. You need to level the resource where the amount needed is greater than the amount you have available. On a resource histogram, you need to chop the tops off the hills and throw them into the valleys. If someone is only available to your project for two days each week, you can’t schedule them for five days work in Week 9. You need to level the resource in the activity and spread the work out over at least two and a half weeks.
Resource levelling is hard work too. It’s often tough enough to level the resources within the project, but it’s even worse where you have to do it across projects where the same people are working on several projects at once.
The tip here is, don’t give up. If three projects all have the same installation team booked for a full week of work in Week 27 then two of them are going to be disappointed … and late. The over-commitment of resource is evident at the start and should be dealt with at the start during the planning.
Find and solve the problems on the plan, not in the project.
Adding Contingency
Something is going to go wrong with your project – unless you’re running it in a rose-tinted, problem-free parallel universe. To accommodate something going wrong you need contingency time and probably contingency money.
Be prepared to defend the contingency in your plans if you come under pressure to strip it out and deliver earlier. One of the examples of planning at the start of this chapter was that needed for a holiday. Why are there so many hotels around airports? Because a lot people go to the airport the day before to be quite sure of catching their flight. Well, if having contingency is sensible for holiday travel, how much more sensible is it for your project?
Updating the Plan
No project ever goes exactly to plan. Your estimates are never going to be spot on to the millisecond and, anyway, things change. At the start of the project, your plan is vital to work out what is to be produced, what work is to be done, who is going to do it and by when. Once the project is up and running though, the plan becomes a vital control document. However it’s only useful for control if it’s up-to-date. That means putting in ‘actuals’ (time actually taken and money actually spent) and adjusting the plan for changes. For example, if team performance is different to what you expected, you’ll need to run that forward to look at the impact on the project. Then again, if something happens in the project such as a change of circumstances or requirements you’ll need to look at the impact and do forward projections to look at the overall effect on the project.
You can’t do any of that forward calculation if the plan is two months out of date. Keep it bang up to date then, and for most projects that will mean inputting actuals and then reviewing it at least weekly. That’s going to need some discipline and determination at times when you’re under pressure but it will pay back over and over.