Advanced Project Management: A Complete Guide to the Key Processes, Models and Techniques

Now that most major decisions have been made and the steering group have approved the schedule it is helpful if everything is recorded in one place. This is usually achieved by producing a project plan. Project plans vary from project to project, because of the diverse nature of the topics they have to cover. This is emphasized more with advanced projects since the projects tend to undertake work that may be new to the organization. However, despite the diversity of content all project plans for advanced projects do have certain common characteristics. Topics that must be covered in the plan are:

• overview of the project;

• control structure and driving mechanisms;

• project organization and structure;

• expected project life cycle;

• key deliverables;

• costs or resource usage.

• Overview of the project

  The overview of the project can probably be taken directly from the introduction to the business case. This will provide a discussion of the purpose and the objective of the project. You will need to add to this details that will have been developed since the business case was written. In particular you should add details of the requirements and key project milestones.

• Control structure and driving mechanisms

  The control structure and driving mechanisms are discussed more fully in Chapter 6. However, at the simplest level you can include details of the key principals and their roles and responsibilities. These were developed during the initiation phase of the project under the theme of defining early roles and responsibilities.

• Project organization and structure

  The project organization and structure should be reasonably well defined by now. The structure that is required, however, is not an organization chart that covers everyone in the project. Instead it is a chart showing the key principals and the key groups and meetings that are in place, for example the project steering group.

• Expected project life cycle

  Depending on the organization you may need to define a life cycle for the project. Many organizations will have their own life cycle and where this is available you should use it. However, in some cases you will need to adjust the life cycle to reflect the unique nature of your project. Throughout this book there are examples of life cycles that could be used.

• Key deliverables

  You will have agreed by now with the steering group a number of deliverables that they want to see resulting from the work of the project. These should be listed along with appropriate success criteria. Wherever possible you should include a quality statement against each deliverable .

• Costs or resource usage

  Costs can be covered by using the material developed in support of the business case. They should cover both the capital costs and the revenue costs. In some cases it will be inappropriate to add the costs to the plan, especially when the plan is to be made public. When this happens you should simply drop this section from the plan.

Often there is discussion about whether the project plan should contain all of these sections and the details contained within them. Many people suggest that there should be separate plans for each topic and that there is significant overlap with other documents already in existence. They would like the project plan simply to refer them to the relevant plan or document. The difficulty with this approach is that many readers will never reach the other plans. Instead they will peruse the project plan and finding little of interest will not become more knowledgeable about the project. Therefore you should produce one plan that covers all of these topics.

When you produce the plan you need to be careful to ensure that you maintain a good balance between repeating information in other plans and putting sufficient information to enable the reader to understand what is proposed. A reasonable way to approach this is to set aside one page per topic (or 400 words). This would mean six pages to cover the topics above. As with previous sizing, this makes authors careful with their words - ideal when communicating with senior managers. Once completed the plan should be agreed by the project steering group and published for access by all project team members .