If you know MS Project, you know how to plan a project. Project Planning is nothing than putting a task list in MS project.

MS Project is a tool which can be learnt easily, but project planning is an art which comes through our experience and lessons learned during those experiences. Any tool like MS project gives you features to persist your planning data (schedule), but it doesn’t teach you various activities of planning which should be done to get a good and successful plan. Tool is a method to implement your planning concept, but you also need to know the inputs, outputs and other methods which give you good and efficient plan.

Project planning is not a task rather a process group with more than one task/activity and we need to exercise each activity of this process group if we want a really good plan. There are couples of activities we need to do for project planning:

1. Collect and study the requirements.

2. Scope Definition, also include non-functional requirements

3. Create WBS with work packages

4. Define and sequence activities

5. Estimate Activity Resources and Activity Durations

6. Develop schedule, MS project might be your tool here.

7. Estimate Costs and determine budget

8. Plan Quality

9. Plan Communication across project

10. Identify Risks and Plan Risk Responses

11. Review your plan with resources and other stakeholder

12. Finalize your project plan

13. Review your plan frequently and analyze the changes if any

14. Use your reserve wherever required

15. Support your project plan till the time project has been closed successfully