The project plan may be one or more documents and refer to other documents but it must be approved by the key stakeholders. If the key stakeholders do not approve the project plan then they may not support the plan and that will lead to a disaster for the project execution phase because essential stakeholder involvement will simply not happen.
Project Management Plan
The project plan, either implicitly or explicitly, will state the project management methodology or project approach (PMI, PRINCE2, Agile, in-house...) by defining what will be done and how. Whatever the approach, to be complete the project implementation plan must describe the reason for the project, project execution and control:
- Introduction - background and context, with perhaps a concise summary of the business case, benefits and drivers
- Objectives - links the project to the business problems being solved and the benefits to be achieved identified during project initiation, the reason for the project
- Scope - defines the project in terms of what will be done for whom and who else is impacted. It is useful to state what is specifically excluded from scope as often stakeholders may make assumptions about scope and their expectations may simply be wrong. Clear scope statements with defined exclusions bring clarity for everyone
- Assumptions - every project will operate with a set of assumptions about the technical environment, parallel projects and initiatives and the business community and its drivers. Again, making these explicit aids transparency
- Organisation, roles and key responsibilities - project resources required to form the project team and project board. In addition, key dependencies should be identified such as vendors or third party suppliers
- Key project deliverables should be identified including hardware, software and documentation
- High level milestones and key project schedule dates
- Project control - quality management of deliverables including standards for managing project documentation, change and release management, configuration management. This may also include incident and problem management for the test phase
- Risk management - how will the project manage project risks and issues
- Escalation procedure - how are issues raised with more senior stakeholders for decision
- Project reporting - how will the project address project status reporting
- References - refer to other plans that are contributing to the project such as stakeholder management and business change management. References to any applicable standards from the quality management system
Detailed Project Plan
- The detailed project implementation plan is often separated from the project plan document due to the need to frequently update it. Typically it is separated into a Gantt Chart or similar that identifies the detailed project tasks, schedule and resources
- Detailed project costs for hardware, software, project resources, suppliers along with forecast spending plan may be separated into a spreadsheet or similar
Project Plan for Project Managers
The project plan is essential for a project manager, it tells all stakeholders what will be done and how the project will be managed and controlled. Consequently, the project plan should be baselined and managed under change control for potential future changes. The current version should be an active, living document to guide project implementation.
Roger Lever - Early career was in Treasury Banking and this led to my interest in financial investment, especially the stockmarket. Enjoy reading widely ...
