All projects have a narrative that describes its objectives, team, schedule, and deliverables. For the narrative to be accurate, careful project planning and management are necessary.
Project planning is the stage of project management where you choose the precise actions to take in order to finish a project. This includes establishing milestones, budgets, timetables, and risk assessments as well as defining duties and allocating tasks to members of the team.
Let’s go through the article and know more about how to make a project plan.
What is Project Planning?
A project management plan, commonly referred to as a project plan, is a written document that describes the procedure your team will follow to manage the project in line with scope in order to achieve its stated goals. A project plan’s objective is to lay out the procedures and materials needed to finish a project on schedule and within budget.
Project planning basically refers to the process of determining the project’s objectives, scope, and necessary procedures to complete the work. One of the most crucial steps in project management is this one. A project management plan is the by-product of the planning process for a project.
A project plan is essential to the success of the project because it conveys important information to all project stakeholders, including dates, assignments, and significant milestones. It is most frequently shown as a gantt chart to make it simple to make sure that work stays on schedule.
Why is Project Plan Important?
Discovering why project plans are crucial in the first place is helpful before diving into the how-to of writing one.
The primary reason project plans are a need is that they enable you to see your complete project from beginning to end and create a clear plan of action for getting you from point A to point B.
By helping us to think through the variables that will affect our project, such as stakeholders, budget, and schedule delays, project plans enable us to create a road to project success. We can then plan how to maximize or minimize these variables.
Having a clear understanding of how to make a financial plan for a project, what needs to be done, when, and by whom, project plans also aid in bringing everyone on board. Frameworks for gauging the progress and effectiveness of projects are created by project plans. By laying out exactly what will be done and when it will be delivered, project plans help stakeholders have reasonable goals.
A really good project plan can also make it clear how the contribution of each team member fits into the overall project scope, which can reach audiences and improve sales, two factors that are essential to the successful completion of a project.
Teams are given purpose and direction by project plans. Clear project plans encourage participation and teamwork by clearly demonstrating to team members how their specific duties and responsibilities lead to the project’s successful achievement.
How to Write a Project Plan
Project plans are undoubtedly a necessary component for every project to succeed. The question is, how to make a budget plan for a project?
1. Establish Project Scope and Metrics
Determining the specifics of your project, including its purpose, constraints, and objectives, is the first stage in drafting a project plan. Clearly state the scope or overarching goal of your project. Verify any requirements or limitations on how to make a project management plan, including the budget, the availability of resources, and the time frame.
It is crucial to spend time defining the scope of your project because doing so will assist you in ensuring that the rest of your project plan advances your project in the area you desire. But identifying the criteria you will use to make sure you are on course as the project proceeds is equally crucial to outlining your project scope and objective.
Decide how your success will be measured. Do you have any measurements, performance standards, or quality requirements?
The basis for the whole of your project plan is laid by clearly outlining what your project is, its ultimate goal, and how you are going to assess success. As such, make certain that you take the time to establish each of these components from the beginning.
2. Identify Key Stakeholder
Once your project’s scope, goal, and KPIs have been established, it’s essential to decide who will be involved in making the project a reality or, to put it another way, to pinpoint the project’s main stakeholders.
Make a list of the people or organizations the project will affect. You should consider how to make a budget plan for a project and to what degree each person should participate in the project in addition to deciding who needs to be involved. Let’s take the scenario where you are in charge of a cross-functional project to introduce a fresh marketing campaign and the team consists of representatives from your marketing, design, and sales departments.
In order to identify your important stakeholders, you may develop multiple lists based on their amount of responsibility or involvement in the project, such as decision-makers, managers, and creative talent from each department.
It will help to direct the remainder of the project plan writing process if it is obvious who is required to participate in the project and how they will be participating.
3. Outline Deliverables
Developing a project plan begins with establishing the aim of your endeavor, as was already said. However, identifying a project’s goal is more abstract; to ensure that your project achieves its goal, you need to go beyond abstraction and into the realm of the physical.
In other words, you have to list all the deliverables your project requires in order to be successful. These are the actual, observable results that your project must yield. What will you conceive, construct, plan, design, produce, achieve, or deliver? The specific, measurable deliverables or results of your project should be clearly stated.
Prior to going on to the next step, you must first define the specific outcomes that your project must provide. This will enable you to reverse-engineer the actions required to achieve those outcomes.
4. Develop Tasks
Your project deliverables can then be broken down into specific, actionable tasks that you can give to your team once you have a clear understanding of what they are and how to make a project plan. Make sure that the project’s work is guided by your deliverables. Up until you reach an actionable task, break down every deliverable into progressively smaller components.
It is essential to consider how each task interacts with the others after you have divided up all of your deliverables into workable, assignable tasks. Only then can you plan, assign, and add constraints in accordance with the interactions between your tasks.
Any task dependencies that should be highlighted include those that prevent one job from beginning until another has been finished. If there are any resources, you will need to complete these tasks, list them.
5. Assign Tasks & Deadline
It’s time to assign your team each of the tasks you have written down along with completion dates for each assignment after you have completed writing them all out.
Along with making sure your project advances steadily, you also need to guarantee that your teams are motivated and engaged by the tasks and deadlines you set for them. Therefore, be careful to include dates for completing activities and deliverables in your project plan that are both reasonable and attainable. To account for job dependencies, draw attention to dates that cannot be changed. To track development and acknowledge accomplishments, include milestones or checkpoints.
You should have a clear idea of how and when your project is expected to come together once you have listed down all of your responsibilities and dates. At that point, the initial writing phase should also be nearly complete. Your project plan isn’t finished just because of that, though. One more crucial step remains in the procedure.
6. Make a Baseline for Performance Measurement
Create a scope-schedule-cost baseline that is integrated into the project work so that it may be used as a control tool. After that, to gauge and manage performance, compare how the project was carried out to your baseline. By using status reports in project management software programs, these baselines can be established.
Throughout a project’s lifecycle, performance should be assessed. By doing this, you can see problems early and take appropriate action. Performance evaluation once the project is over is crucial. You can then assess both group and individual performance by comparing actual outcomes to the baselines.
7. Sharing, Getting Feedback, and Modifying the Project Plan as Needed
Whereas phases 1 to 5 may constitute your first writing process, it’s crucial to discuss your project plan among your team and solicit their feedback on how they believe it may be strengthened if you want it to be as solid and comprehensive as possible. The project management team and other important parties should be made aware of the plan, and any suggestions for changes or enhancements should be gathered.
Your project plan is complete once you have gathered the opinions of your team and have made any necessary modifications as a result. However, as your project moves along, things could alter or evolve, therefore it’s crucial to remain adaptable and make alterations and updates as necessary.
Plan on revising it as you learn more, run into new requirements and delays, get feedback, and make mistakes. You will be able to adjust tasks and due dates when deliverables are created while using the project plan to direct your activities and track progress. This will help you to modify your plan as the project progresses.
5 Best Project Plan Template on WPS
Organizing project plans is becoming more popular, but first you must understand how to make a project plan using templates.
You are able to handle project tasks while keeping an eye on the deadline with the help of the Project Plan Templates for Excel. The jobs can all be compiled in one location. In a short amount of time, project managers can monitor and control the progress of the project. For project managers, these templates are simple to utilize.
A set of basic project plan templates is provided below.
1. Basic Professional Project Timeline
You can keep track of deadlines using this polished project timetable template. Through this template, managers can delegate duties. You may either download a pre-made horizontal bar chart from the WPS or customize your own.
2. Project Gantt Chart
To plan and track the development of your projects, you can use a project plan template. You can enhance your job by using a customizable horizontal bar chart. You can distribute this user-friendly project plan template for Excel to others who are interested.
3. Business Project Plan
Utilize the complimentary project plan template to obtain a polished project plan in blue. It will be a fantastic chance for you to discuss the methods you plan to use to reach your objectives in a stylish manner. It is a project plan template that is suitable for commercial use and that you can modify to suit your requirements.
4. Yearly Project Management System
Due to its excellent layout, this yearly project management template stands out among the competition. The project description is added using banded rows and columns. This project plan template is available for free download.
5. Red Work Project Plan
Your greatest option for presenting your projects will be the project plan template in the color red. You will save time and be able to provide a polished and appealing project plan proposal. Improve your work by using the free project plan template.
Utilize a project plan template to arrange your tactics and accomplish your objectives. Additionally, you will have better control over your work and be able to track the project’s development.
Have you been unable to locate a template that will work for you? WPS Office can be downloaded. Numerous free templates will be available for you to choose from. You can use WPS Academy to get to know how to use these templates and guides on other topics as well.
