The first rule of project management is: people do the work on a project. Significant success requires good people and good people management. In addition to the above, successful implementation also requires a good plan.
How should the project plan be implemented and what should it contain? When drawing up the plan, it is a good idea to consider the following aspects.
- The plan must include the full scope of the project. This is to prevent unintended scope creep during the project.
- The plan must be clear and understandable to all parties: What we will do, how we will do it, when we will do it and who will do it.
- Progress monitoring and reporting must be based on a pre-agreed best practice. The project plan must support monitoring and steering.
- The plan needs to be clear without being too detailed, which makes it difficult to follow and makes reporting complicated. If the plan is too vague, monitoring and comparing progress against the plan will not be carried out with the accuracy needed for guidance.
- The project team will jointly develop a plan for the team, following the principle:
“With the team, by the team and for the team”. - The plan must be “frozen” as a baseline plan. Otherwise, the project will have no benchmark against which to compare the forecast and, why not, the success.
- The plan must address the uncertainties associated with the implementation of the project and their potential impact.
- Success criteria are often seen as part of a good project plan.
It is assumed that the company has been successful in its project preparation and has been able to obtain competent resources for the project, and that sufficient and correct input data is available for project planning. The next step is to find the people with the skills to produce a good quality project plan.
Challenges encountered when looking for project plan authors or when drafting a project plan include:
- The plan is developed by a group of people (or a person) who know how to use project planning software, but who do not have the skills to engage other professional staff in project planning and may not have the skills to communicate the plan to the project team, client or management.
- The plan is only intended to be produced for the client to monitor progress from the client’s point of view, and does not contain important information for the implementers on how a job will be carried out in practice and who will carry it out.
- The project plan has been prepared by one person and does not draw on the expertise of the project team. It is therefore one person’s vision of implementation.
- The challenge of job recommendation. In addition to the end results, the plan must be able to show how the work will be carried out.
- The preparation of the plan has been commissioned to a person outside the project, who in fact has no further role in the implementation of the project.
- The plan is an optimistic view of the project’s implementation and does not take into account the impact of the implementation environment on the project, such as the situation of the company or the prevailing market conditions. However, the project is not immune to these influences. An analysis of the feasibility of the plan is therefore required.
In delivery projects, the project plan typically forms part of the contract. The plan describes what, how, when and by whom. Delays result in fines or, in the worst case, termination of the contract and liability for compensation. A quality project plan could be compared to an insurance policy to prevent damage.