Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Project Planning in a Nutshell

Project planning is like other types of planning—you figure out what you’re going to do before you do it. And like other types of plans, project plans are destined to change, because the projects they guide never happen exactly as planned. But the inevitability of change shouldn’t scare you off planning. What you learn during the planning process can help you keep a project on course even when changes occur.

Project planning involves two main elements: why you’re doing the project, and how you’re going to do it. You begin by identifying what the project is supposed to accomplish. Only then can you start planning how to achieve the project’s goals.

Veteran project managers have official names for each part of a project plan, but any plan boils down to a series of questions. The rest of this chapter describes the components of a project plan in more detail, but here are the basics:

• Why are we going to perform this project? The answer to this question describes the point of the project. You can also rephrase this question as “What’s the problem we want to solve or the opportunity we want to leverage?” You describe the problem that the project is supposed to solve in the problem statement (Defining the Project’s Goal and Objectives).

• What are we going to achieve? By definition, a project eventually ends. You have to know what the project is supposed to achieve so you can tell when it’s done. The first step is to spell out all the goals, or project objectives ...