Planning is the compulsory activity for projects of any size – it can be for few weeks, or for years. Project planning gives a complete visibility about tasks to be completed, schedules / milestones to be followed, and resources / skill sets required to complete the project in successful way. It helps a lot in committing deliverables with clients. Basically it improves the accountability, quality of deliverables and trust on overall management.

Let’s discuss about 5 Key elements required for any project planning – it can be a software project, or a social activity, construction or even any engineering work.

Work Breakdown: Basically a detail list of tasks to be completed. Start from the day one work and try to break big tasks into details as much as possible. Let the duration of activity be minimum 1 day – (8 Hours) - the maximum 5 days (40 Hours). If many activities are going to be completed in one day – group them and assign 0.5 / 0.25 type of durations. This helps you to understand what all we have to do in given time.

Resources: It can be people who for the project, or even the equipments required completing the job. For every task in your Work Breakdown List – assign a resource, and make sure the resource is not overloaded anywhere – you can do this by seeing, how many hours the resource is loaded with tasks per day. Add resource cost to see the cost of overall execution. You can even group resources to identify group level resource usages in future.

Connect Tasks: Predecessors help to connect each task with its pre-requisite task. For example – Task 1 should be completed before we start Task 2. In this case, the Task 1 is the predecessor for Task 2. Task 2 becomes successor for Task 1. You can have multiple predecessors, if a single task requires more than one task to be completed before its starting date. There are different type of predecessors – Finish to Start, Start to Start, Start to Finish and Finish to Finish – lets discuss about this more in future articles.

Calendar: Update your calendar in Plans with holidays and resource available status information. This will have an impact with schedules. Using a calendar with expected holidays, and leave status, resource availability statuses is always a good practice in project management.

Baseline: This is an important process with project plans – Baseline you plan for any future tracking and status updates. Baseline helps you to generate management reports with tasks, schedules and resources. If your scope is increased after few weeks of project start date – update the new activities, assign resources and re-baseline the project plan – but remember to re-baseline only new and updated tasks.

The Project plan should be tracked for status updates every day. Add milestone tasks under each important deliverables and flag them once it is completed. You can generate all management level reports with project management tools – there are many tools available in online & offline.