7 questions to ask yourself when making a project plan

Planning
01 September 2019

You have just been assigned to a large collective project. You are leading several teams, managing difficult tasks and resources and trying to meet the deadline – the process is like building a house of cards.

The work has hardly started, and people are already coming to you with questions, hesitations and ideas.

What should I do? How do I get there? How does work on this project correspond to our general goals? Wouldn’t it be better to do it this way instead of that?

You start feeling how work on the project turns into a complete chaos and you need to create a specific structure as soon as possible. In other words, you need a plan.

Seven questions to ask yourself when making a project plan

It seems impossible to sit down and make a complete plan that grasps everything to the smallest detail at this point as your head is spinning from the number of participants and work load that you will have to do.

When making a project plan, the easiest start is to point out the basic elements that must be in your plan. Then, you will be able to place them in the right order and fill in the blanks.

So, what basic elements do you need? Here are seven questions you must ask yourself to make a plan.

Question № 1. Project goals

Before diving into your future plan’s details, answer the two main questions: “What?” and “Why”? What is your project and why are you doing it?

When you do that, more clarity will come, but your main goal is much deeper – you need to make sure every participant of the project has a good understanding of what they need to do before the project starts.

According to many managers, the absence of clearly stated goals results in the failure of 37% of projects. A more detailed and thoughtful approach and quantitative measures are necessary. They will help you follow the course of project execution and notice possible setbacks immediately.

Keep in mind that a project might have several smaller goals constituting one big goal. These goals can even be different for different participating sides.

For example, while marketing department is interested in attracting new potential customers, PR-specialists care most about publications in press and developers are hoping to receive positive feedback from clients.

Write down all your goals (big and small) right now so that you don’t leave anything out creating other parts of your project plan.

ADVICE: You will need to work hard to formulate a really effective goal. Use SMART tactic to take into account all the necessary factors when setting a goal.

Question № 2. Roles and areas of responsibility

A project usually requires a lot of people, especially if it’s a big one. On one side, it allows to generate a lot of ideas and innovations but on the other, responsibility diffuses among everyone.

A vivid separation of responsibility areas helps avoid the confusion and misunderstanding. It is also very important to give the participants transparent knowledge of who does what. For you, this knowledge will be helpful in setting deadlines and managing resources and team load.

Always point out clearly who does which part of the project and who is the responsible assignee so that people know who to speak to in case of issues.

If your project is too large, it might be hard to describe everything in the smallest detail. Don’t worry – at least start with defining what specific teams and departments do so that people know who is responsible for a particular part of the project.

Question № 3. Resources

To plan and realize the project, various resources, materials, equipment, tools and of course people are needed.

In one of the surveys done by The Project Management Institute (PMI), ineffective resource planning was named second most frequent reason for project failure.

Preliminary assessment of the needed resources will allow to optimize and manage them more effectively as well as avoid trying to find them last minute.

To simplify, let’s break down all our resources into two big categories ignoring their priority:

  • Equipment: any materials, program tools, space and technology needed for the project.
  • People: professionals that you will assign to the project, be it your employees, agencies, suppliers, contractors or someone else.

It’s a bit tricky with people because there is always a lack of professionals. You need to make sure you are not overloading any employee or team by giving them too much work.

The list of roles and responsibilities we created earlier will help you determine who you will need to engage in the project so that their team lead or manager does not overload them with other work when you need them.

Think of other “helpers” you might attract for a successful realization of the project.

ADVICE: BM allows to see all your resources online so that you manage them most effectively.

Read our next article to learn about 4 other essential questions to ask yourself when making a project plan.