Project Management Planning Process – Watch this step by step video detailing the steps to take in planning your project. Learn how to develop a project management plan for your next project, and show your organization that you can deliver.
So your boss has assigned you a project and asked you to develop a project management plan and show it to them tomorrow and you’re confused you don’t know where to start you have no clue what it means to plan a project my name is Edward Shehab and I’m gonna show you 14 steps that you should take in planning out your project stay tuned [Music] welcome back I’m going to show you in this video 14 steps you could take in order for you to plan out your project step number one you need to find out what it is that your boss wanted now we’re going to be referring to your boss as the project sponsor they’re the one who asked you to do this it doesn’t mean they have to fund it themselves but they are the sponsor of the project or the champion there are different names that we use for this so they asked you to run a project or manage a project is it to fix a problem is there something wrong that needs to be corrected what does the outcome look like what does it look like right now you’re going to need to find this information out if it’s if it’s an opportunity that they’re trying to capture then what does the end result look like what is it that they’re trying to gain what is the physical outcome that they would like to see ask your boss if they’ve seen something like this before if they have some sort of a blueprint of what this product looks like ask them to show you any documentation about this one project or the product of the project find out if there was a business case that you should be reviewing or feasibility study that was done is it a statement of work is that a contract is it as strategic mandates find out what information exists and take it home and read it or read it in the office if you can’t take it home so that was step number one step number two develop a project charter a project charter is sometimes called a project initiation document or a project brief and it stands for a one-page or two-page document that includes all of the high-level objectives of the project things such as why are we running the project like the justification what is the end product how much time are we going to have on it how much is the budget are there any key dependencies are we making any assumptions who are the key stakeholders in the organization that will support you on it are there some key milestones that they’re looking to achieve now once you have the Charter prepared what you want to do is you want to review this with your sponsor your boss and have them go over it and if they’re okay with it let them sign it ask them to please sign that one document and if they can they should also send out an email to all of the top Department managers and let them know that this project has been initiated and that you are going to be the project manager on that that gives you credibility for you to go around talking to different people and asking questions and ask them to review some documents or existing processes all right so now you’ve been assigned you’ve got all the details you developed a project charter and the next thing that you need to do is step number three you need to start identifying the stakeholders what is the stakeholder a stakeholder is anyone who has anything to do with this one project they’re either going to be positively or negatively affected by this one project or they are going to either they’re probably going to be positively or negatively effecting your project so either they’re affected or they can affect this one project there could be a decision-maker a regulator a contributor a technical resource a department head a supplier anyone who is going to have anything to do with this one project is a stakeholder you should try to identify your stakeholders from the inside out from the people who are going to be working on developing the product of the project all the way out to the organization and outside to your customers or suppliers or representative of that once you have identified your stakeholders go to step number four start preparing your project management plan guess what project management plans do not get developed in one day they take time you had a meet with all the different stakeholders and talk to them understand how they feel about the project how they feel about the end product do they have anything to contribute are there any restrictions are there things you need to find out are there regulations you should consider so project management plan means that you probably sometimes have to have a team to help you with this and you have to spend a few days after a few weeks to get all the necessary details for you to put together a final plan alright so tell your boss the plant cannot be developed in one day and that you gotta talk to everybody involved for you to be able to understand what’s going to go into this one plant so starting the plant is just one thing and you’re going to have a lot of subsidiary plans that are going to go into this project management plan so now let’s go into step number five from your stakeholder list that you made that you’ve identified you need to start collecting requirements from those stakeholders so a requirement in case you’re wondering is either a condition or a capability a condition means it’s something that is put as a constraint on your project it’s a beginning and/or an end date a specific budget that you can’t go over a compliance requirement for example working hours requirements resource utilization requirements whatever it is language requirements you know language requirements can actually be a capability but these conditions are not going to be showing in the final product in the looks of the product what will show will be the capability and the capability the capability requirements those are the ones that talk about what the product does right so does it go 500 rotations per minute is it 8 feet tall is it made out of plastic so these are the descriptive items of your final product so you want the conditions and you want the capabilities and these will be your requirements once you’ve collected all of these requirements oh before we go too far make sure you include quality and safety requirements and communication requirements and resource requirements these are all part of the requirements don’t just focus on the final product the physical product think about what it takes and things of what it takes to actually manage this one project and these are called project requirements so we have the product requirements that’s what the product needs to have for specifications and we have the project requirements or project management requirements which could be resources you need research that you have to do meetings that you gotta run and so on so these are your project management requires collect all of these requirements and go to the next step which is step number six and that’s to develop your scope statement your scope statement is an expansion or let’s say an expanded project charter it has a little bit more so if you basically if you took your project charter and you took your requirements and you added them together you’re going to get the scope statement the scope statement talks about what the end product is that you’re going to be delivering and what else you’re delivering with that are you delivering some coaching training are you delivering some technical manuals along with it what are you going to hand over and those tend to be bullet eyes in the scope statement the scope statement can be turned in with the list of requirements in order to make it more clear in the scope statement we also write what is excluded if you think your customer or your sponsor is going to imagine some end product having some additional specifications that you have not planned for then be very clear that these are not state them in the exclusions that these are not part of the scope deliverables so that’s your scope statement and that’s step number six once you have your scope statement and let’s say you review it with your sponsor and your sponsor is okay with it it is time to plan out how this is going to be executed and that takes us to step number seven which is to create your work breakdown structure the work breakdown structure called sometimes just that WBS is an or it’s similar to an organizational chart you’re taking all of the work and you’re breaking it down into smaller pieces so you could break it down by the nature of the work a WBS represents all of the work that is going to be delivered but it is broken down into smaller tinier pieces that makes it easier to manage so after you do your WBS you go to step number eight step step number eight is to look for what resources will be required for every one of these WBS work packages underneath there’s going to be activities that will need to be done to deliver that one package so if your team is going to be working on that one package what activities are they going to be doing so typically what I would do what most projects had do is that every piece is assigned to a team lead who then has their own resources or a team that would be doing the activities for that one task and by the way you probably would have to go to department heads and negotiate for these resources and make sure they give you the better ones not the ones that were happy to just dump on you right and then you know probably count them you know as a relief budget wise make sure you get all the good people and ask for how many hours they can allocate to your project so that you know from the beginning whether you need to get some additional contractors on the project or not if it’s a contractor then the contractor will tell you what sorts of activities they will be doing they have their own team or resources that will be working on it so step number eight looks at the resource requirements for that one project so once you figure your resource is out then let’s go to step number nine step number nine is to develop your project schedule now project schedules are pretty common and you know I’ve seen varieties of these the very very basic form can be developed in Excel but Excel isn’t as versatile and does not allow you to make changes easily and doesn’t show the connections between activities the best way to do it is using things you know software like Microsoft Project or Primavera and this way you can use bar charts you may want to look at a different video on how to develop schedules but you got to develop your schedule by taking all the activities that were previously identified by your team or by the contractor and try to sequence them back to back with durations with dependencies understand which one needs to wait for the other understand which activity can run at the same time as the other validate the time estimate the using for these ask them you know the basis for their estimates where did they get them is it based on experience or is it based on being you know maybe pessimistic but find out where the estimates are coming from and try to developed put all the activities and proper sequencing overlap the ones that you can so they can run at the same time and then that would also clarify the resources that you’re going to require so once we’ve identified how long the project takes now we need to review it with the sponsor and make sure they’re fine with it a lot of times they will ask you to simplify it or make it shorter and so what you have to do is look for opportunities for you to overlap or what we call fast-track fast-track some of these activities overlap them run them at the same time that’s going to increase your risk a little bit and then look at adding maybe resources in some places which we call crashing and or maybe look at the working hours overtime and so on or maybe look at you know building efficiency in the team or using better tools for them to get things done and that’s going to speed up your project all right look at putting leads where you can have something start and not really wait for something else to be finished if you can right and if there are lags or waiting periods that are unnecessary to remove those remove any buffers or any padding you’ve put you know for risk into that project so that you can reduce the duration of that one project once you have a schedule that your boss is okay with then it’s time to develop the project budget you do know the resources that were you’re working on it you do know the resources will tell you what sorts of materials they’ll be using on the project all you need is cost estimates for the resources and for the materials and you can have your budget you can even figure out what you’ll be spending weekly monthly quarterly if you want and that’s going to help you develop your cash flow analysis it’s mostly going to be cash going out and but you’re going to figure out what it is that you need for money to fund this one project and you can ask you can develop a funding schedule for your management so they know how much to fund you every quarter or every month if that’s how they’re going to be funding the project and they would know what to expect the line alright the schedule and the budget and the scope the requirements all these that we’ve talked about can later be used to monitor your project and see how your project is going having a good plan means you have something you can use to monitor your project once you have your budget that was step number ten now let’s go to step number eleven step number eleven has to do with asking yourself what could go wrong on this one project now we’re talking about risks what are the risks in your project what could go wrong on your project what all these plans that we have we’ve identified the stakeholders and we know some of them can be troublesome we’ve identified requirements we’ve put together a scope statement we’ve you know created work packages we’ve started thinking about outsourcing some of the work we have a schedule we know the resources that we’re working on it we know the budgets that have been estimated what can go wrong on that one project all right so sit with your team and try to figure out what could go wrong and then once you have a list of all the things that could go wrong the risks then go to step number 12 mitigate those risk what does it mean to mitigate find ways to reduce the chance that a risk can happen or to reduce the effect if the risk actually happens look at the probability that a risk can happen and the impact it would have on your project objectives if it’s not going to affect your project objectives it is not a risk okay so you need to have a clear understanding of what the project objectives are and then look for the things that could affect them and look for ways to mitigate them there are four ways to mitigate risks right you could avoid the risk like taking it out from your project so a certain software presents a problem for you you think it might not be it might not integrate well so take that software out and now you’ve avoided that one risk but you might introduce a secondary risk that way right if you can’t avoid the risk then look at transferring the risk which means outsourcing or buying insurance if that’s a possibility if you can’t transfer the risk then look at mitigating the risk or reducing the probability or impact of the risk happening adding additional resources taking additional training double-checking improving your quality processes that will mitigate the risk a little bit but that’s all going to come at a cost let’s say you could not avoid you could not transfer you could not mitigate the risk then you may want to consider accepting the risk alright you could accept and put a budget you could accept you know a contingency budget or you can accept and do nothing about it because there’s nothing you can really do about the risk so that was step number twelve you you’re developing your mitigation plan step number 13 is to update your project management plan with all these mitigation actions you want to make your project management plan your scope your budget your schedule your requires you want to make them more likely to succeed and so you’re going to in you’re going to change them using the mitigation actions that you came up with so if you thought you’re going to eliminate some software from the program fine eliminate it now your new plan does not have it if you thought you’re going to have additional two resources or maybe someone who’s more senior on your project and do that now your project is safer it has someone who’s more skilled and can do the project for you so your mitigation actions need to be added into your project management plan and modified and once you have the modified project management plan we go to the final step step number fourteen sit with your boss and review the updated plan we go through the whole thing tell them who you talk to it tell them about their requirements you collected tell them about what scope you’ve included and excluded to show them who’s going to be what part of the projects going to be outsourced than the WBS show them talk to them you know tell them what the resources will be what sort of a schedule you’ve developed your final schedule and talk to them about the budget requirements how much they need to fund you on a periodic basis what were the risks that you’ve identified what actions you’ve taken to mitigate them who participated in this risk mitigation process and then the final project plan and it includes all of your project baselines a baseline is an agreed to part of the plan and we usually talk about the scope baseline the scheduled baseline and the cost baseline right within the scope based on you could also include quality baseline right these are the ones that you want to agree to with your boss your boss looks at your plan says everything is good I love what you did and you say alright can you just sign off on this once they sign off then your baselines have been signed up and that was step number fourteen alright so now what you have is a fully developed plan and your boss has agreed to it the next step after this will be to go to execution but that’s for a different video so I hope you enjoyed these fourteen steps that I gave you in planning out your project if you want to know more if you have any specific concern talk to me I am an expert in project management I’ll be happy to respond to you put your comments down below if you like this video please subscribe and if you know others who can benefit from this video please share while you subscribing please like this video make sure you hit the notification bell so you can be notified about new videos that will be released I’ll be releasing additional videos on all of the you know additional details about the fourteen steps the Charter you know identifying stakeholders collecting requirements there’s already one and collecting the requirements but you know I’ll be talking about that WBS the scope the critical path schedules budgets risk management so if you want to be notified about additional videos that I will be releasing then please subscribe and hit that notification button alright well that’s all for now and I hope to see you on the next video
