Introduction

Lola met with her executive director last week to discuss the donors’ database that had to be completed by the new year so that the organization could use it during a fundraising campaign. Lola was concerned that the timeline was unachievable, and scrawled the project schedule on the back of a napkin five minutes before the meeting. She was surprised when the executive director was less than impressed with her presentation style. Lola and I were now back in the coffee shop, discussing what to do next.

I have often seen (and even produced!) project plans that resembled Lola’s napkin. They are somewhat sketchy, poorly planned, and lack input from the team. They are more useful for wiping up the inevitable coffee spill on the keyboard than for guiding a project. So it was with Lola’s plan. It served to show the big picture, but did not focus on any of the project details. The plan needs to show the details so that the project manager can accurately plan and monitor the project as it moves forward.

Two coffees and one sticky bun later, Lola and I finished discussing how to create a project plan.

The What and Why of a Project Plan

After understanding why you are doing the project and what the project is going to create, the project plan is one of the most important pieces of documentation.

The project plan is simply the list of activities, people, and time required to finish the project. It resembles a task list, but the activities are organized hierarchically, and need to have dates and people attached to them. To illustrate, “Clean the kitchen” is a task. However, “Harry will clean the kitchen on Saturday afternoon” is an activity on a project plan. The task is associated with a person and time.

There are a plethora of reasons that you should develop a project plan. Here are just a few:

• It allows you to estimate when certain people need to commit to working on the project.
• It keeps you organized and helps to keep you from getting off track! It is easy to start doing work that is not related to the project.
• Budgets are based on who will be working on the project and how long it will take them. Remember from the last article: if the schedule increases, the budget will also have to increase.

How to Create the Plan

Step 1: Make a List of Tasks

• Identify all tasks that need to be done during the project. They will range from small such as stuffing envelopes to larger tasks such as informing the sector about the new donors database.
• Put these tasks into a hierarchy. For example, stuffing envelopes is one of the tasks that make up the activity called “informing the sector about the new donors database.” It is not a different activity, just a more detailed step. What tasks are subtasks of others?

Step 2: Organize the Tasks

• Organizing tasks means putting them in order, and is a critical step in the process. What has to happen first?
• In project management language, this is called creating the dependencies ­ those tasks that are dependent on another starting or finishing. Lola is unable to begin training people on how to use the donors’ database until the database is completed. This is a dependency.
• Ensuring the activities are in a sensible order can make or break a project. It seems simple enough in the example above, but on complex projects, there are many, many dependencies that all flow together. Often projects get stalled because they get tripped up waiting for something to finish before the rest of the project team can keep working on anything. It increases the effort and the schedule.
• There may be external dependencies also. These are dependencies that are not part of the project, but will affect it. Lola needs to have the names of donors to put into the database. Her project is not responsible for getting those names, but she also cannot complete her project until that is completed.

Step 3: Identify People to Work on the Tasks

• Assign people to work on the tasks. There should be one person responsible for completing each task. Many people might work on the task or help that person out, but one person needs to be responsible for ensuring it is done.

Step 4: Create the schedule

• A schedule is made up of two time estimates: effort and duration. The effort is the amount of work that will go into the task. Duration is the calendar time that will pass from start to finish.
• Lola needs someone to write a user manual for the database. She has assigned Manni. He will need 5 days of work to complete the manual, but can only work half time. Therefore, the duration is 10 days. Ten days will pass on the calendar from start to finish, but he will only spend 5 days doing the work.

Example of a Project Plan

Although there are tools to help create project plans (e.g., MS Project, Workbench), you can use a word processor to document the plan. Lola’s plan might look something like this:

Activity/Task	Responsible	Effort	Dates (Duration)
1. Write training manual
-Develop table of contents	Henry	1 day	Nov 1 to Nov 3
-Review and edit	Lola	1 day	Nov 6 to Nov 10
-Develop document outline	Henry	2 days	Nov 11 to Nov 15
2. Train users
-Develop training plan	Henry	3 days	Nov 6 to Nov 10

 

Project Planning Tips

Lola felt that creating a project plan would be quite difficult. She is right. Estimating how long a project will take and what is involved in doing it are some of the hardest things that a project manager will do. However, it is an essential step in the process and one that can be a little easier if you observe a few tips:

• Use sticky notes. It is a secret trick of project managers to use sticky notes when they figure out the project tasks. They write one task per sticky note and are able to arrange and rearrange as necessary. After it is all organized, they document it using a more permanent record.
• Involve the people who are going to do the work when estimating how long the tasks will take. A database developer can probably estimate more accurately how long it will take to create the database than the project manager.
• Be realistic about how long it will take. Everybody takes breaks and gets interrupted. After deciding on the initial estimate, add some time to it – about 30%.
• Look at it backwards. Start from the project deliverables (remember the scope statement in the first article?) and work backwards. It is often easier to figure out whether all of the required tasks are in the plan by using this method.
• Break it down further. If you have no idea how long something will take, break the activity down further and estimate how long it will take to do each of those subtasks.
• Guess. Many fail to create a good plan because they think it will be wrong. And it will be – at least for some tasks! You can (and will) make changes to it later.

Summary

Creating a plan is an important step when beginning your project. It will be used to estimate when the project will be done and help ensure people are able to work on the project when you need them. The project plan is also a key document when developing the budget. As every project manager knows, creating the project plan can be a very difficult and time-consuming task, but don’t be daunted! It will save you time in the end and is the key to project success. Remember: practice makes perfect!

Blair Witzel (blair@mcdoane.com) is a member of the Project Management Institute and a consultant with McDonnell Doane + Associates, an information management and technology firm focusing on the not-for-profit and public sectors. His work centres on managing multi-project portfolios and working with organizations to develop project management methodologies to more effectively deliver projects.