1. Project Planning
Nadeem Kureshi

2. Planning
"Better go home & make a net, rather than dive for fish at random."
Chinese proverb
 "When you are thirsty, It's too late to dig a Well.”
Japanese Proverb
“Good fortune is what happens when Opportunity meets with Planning”
Thomas Alva Edison
“He who fails to Plan, Plan to fails It is a bad Plan that admits of no Modification”
Peter Drucker

3. A Definition of a Project
A project is a “well-defined sequence of events with a beginning and an end, directed towards achieving a clear goal, and conducted by people within such established parameters as time, cost, resources, and quality.”

4. Project Plan
Planning is not same as Scheduling, it must Precede Scheduling.
Schedule is a “Calendar for Execution of Plan”.
Improper Project Plan- Cause of Poor Project Execution
It is Important to develop the plan early in Project, prior to any major activities.

5. Project Plan - Not Static Document
Revised during life of project whenever appropriate. But doesn't mean it can be changed anytime there is forecasted schedule or cost overrun.
Plan changed to avoid negative variations from cost & schedule targets

6. Planning can be approached by asking a series of questions:
What actions are needed?
By when are these actions needed?
Who is going to do them?
What resources are required?
What other work is not going to be done?
How shall we know if it is working?

7. Discussing the issues to produce a joint plan with the team usually creates a sense of commitment that can be crucial to the project's success.
Communication Plan and Communication Matrix

8. The Communications Matrix
a way of noting who needs to be consulted and at what stage.
Can be a formal chart or rough notes
Purpose is to help minimise the problems that arise when people feel they have not been consulted.

9. Communication Matrix for putting a new building into use

10. Taking an Overview - Phases
Phases are generally sequential and are usually defined by some form of technical information transfer or technical component handoff.
Cost and staffing levels are low at the start, peak during the intermediate phases, and drop rapidly as the project draws to a conclusion.

11. Phases – Costs and Staffing

12. Phases – Stakeholder Influence and Change Costs
Uncertainty highest and risk of failing to achieve the objectives greatest at start of the project. The certainty increases as the project continues.
Ability of the stakeholders to influence the final characteristics of the project’s product and the final cost of the project is highest at the start, and gets progressively lower as the project continues. A major contributor to this phenomenon is that the cost of changes and correcting errors generally increases as the project continues.

14. Classic 6 Phase Projects
Define: The project is discussed fully with all the stakeholders and the key objectives are identified. The costs and timescales are also established at this stage and there is often a feasibility study as well. This stage is complete when the project brief has been written and agreed.
Plan: An initial plan is developed. Planning is an ongoing activity because the plan is the basis for reviews and revision when necessary, depending on how the project progresses.
Team: The team members are usually involved in developing the plan and are often able to contribute specialist knowledge and expertise. The building of this team and its motivation and leadership also continue until the project is finished.
Communications: should take place continuously, both within the project team and between the project team and stakeholders in the project, including anyone who contributes to achievement of the outcomes. Some communications will be through formal reporting procedures but many will be informal.
Control: Implementation takes place during the control stage (stage 4 in the model). During this stage, the tasks and activities of the team will be monitored against the plan to assess the actual progress of the project against the planned progress. Control is essential to ensure that the objectives are met within the scheduled timescales, budgeted costs and quality. Regular reviews are usually held to enable the plan to be revised and for any difficulties that emerge to be resolved.
Review and exit: The review is held to evaluate whether all the intended outcomes of the project have been met. It is also important because it enables information to be gathered about the processes used in carrying out the project from which lessons can be learned for the future. The exit from the project has to be managed to ensure that:
any outstanding tasks are completed;
all activities that were associated with the project are discontinued;
all resources are accounted for, including any that remain at the end and have to be transferred or sold to someone else.

15. The project plan – 7 Elements
a work breakdown structure to show separate tasks and activities;
the team structure and responsibilities of key people;
an estimate of effort and duration for each task;
a schedule to show the sequence and timing of activities;
details of resources to be allocated to each task;
details of the budget to be allocated to each cost identified;
contingency plans to deal with risks identified.

16. Approach to Planning bottom-up top-down work backwards
bottom-up – identify all the small tasks that need to be done and then group them into larger, more manageable blocks of work;
top-down – start by mapping out the major blocks of work that will need to be carried out and then break them down into their constituent tasks;
work backwards from the completion date if that is a given point in time, for example, 1 January, and then fill in the intermediate stages that will enable you to get there.

17. Contingency plans indicate what to do if unplanned events occur.
As simple as formalising and recording the thought processes when you ask ‘what if …?’ and decide which options you would follow if the ‘what if?’ situation happened.
The key points in contingency planning can be summarised as follows:
Note where extra resources might be obtained in an emergency and be aware of the points in your plan where this might be required.
Identify in advance those dates, which if missed, will seriously affect your plans, e.g. gaining financial approval from a committee that meets only once every six weeks.
Know your own plan very well; probe for its weak points and identify those places where there is some ‘slack’ which only you know about …
Keep all those involved (including yourself) well informed and up-to-date on progress so that problems can be addressed before they cause too much disruption.
Recognise the key points in your plan where there are alternative courses of action and think through the possible scenarios for each one.
Learn from experience – sometimes the unpredictable peaks and troughs in activity follow a pattern – it's just that we have yet to recognise it.
The following suggestions for dealing with contingencies were all made by practising managers:
Break key tasks down to a greater level of detail to give better control.
Be prepared to overlap phases and tasks in your plan in order to meet time-scales, but give the necessary extra commitment to communication and co-ordination this will require.
Spend time at the start in order to pre-empt many of the problems.
Learn from experience, e.g. develop a list of reliable contractors, consultants, etc.
Try and leave some slack before and after things which you cannot directly control, to minimise the knock-on effect of any problems prior to, or during, such tasks.

18. Identifying Key Stages – Logic Diagram

19. Project Brief - Checklist
Project title
Name of sponsor and main contact for project approval
Locations – address of sponsor, project location, contact address
Name of person managing the project and possibly their organisation if different from that of the project sponsor
Date of agreement of project brief
Date of project start and finish
Background to the project and purpose with goals outlined
Key objectives with quality and success criteria
Details of how achievement of these will bring benefits to the business or sponsoring organisation
Scope of the project and any specific boundaries

20. Project Brief – Checklist ….
Constraints
Assumptions
Timescale of the project
Deliverables and target dates (milestones)
Estimated costs
Resourcing arrangements
Reporting and monitoring arrangements
Decision-making arrangements – level of authority and accountability held by manager of project and arrangments for any necessary renegotiation
Communications arrangements
Signature of sponsor with date, title and authority

21. Identifying deliverables
The project brief - goals of the project and key objectives. (S.M.A.R.T)
At an early stage of planning identification all of project objectives and the deliverables crucial (including implied deliverables).
Each objective must identify a clear outcome. (the deliverable)
Some sort of change achieved - production of something new – A handing over ….
The project brief will identify the goals of the project and may express some of these as key objectives. At an early stage of planning you will need to identify all of the project objectives and the deliverables that are implied or required from each objective.
Each objective will identify a clear outcome. The outcome is the deliverable. In some cases, the outcome will be some sort of change achieved and in other cases it will be the production of something new. In either case, the project deliverables should be identified so that it will be easy to demonstrate that they have been achieved.
Deliverables:
need to be handed over to someone authorised to receive them;
at the handover, there should be a formal acknowledgement that the specification has been fully met and each item has been ‘signed off’ as fully acceptable;
the deliverable will be something for which users will need some training to use or something that needs to be implemented in some way. In these cases, once the deliverable has been identified, it is important to agree who will be responsible for the ongoing training or implementation, so that there are no misunderstandings about the boundary of the project.

22. Mapping Tasks and Activities
One of the most difficult aspects of planning a project is estimating how long it will take to complete each key stage. An estimate might be based on:
the size of the tasks and the effort required to complete them;
the number of days that are not available for working on the project;
historical data from other projects, including the experience of colleagues.
Where a project has a fixed end-date (for example, an event where a Member of Parliament will declare a new building open) there is a natural tendency to try to compress the schedule to fit all the key stages into the time available. All too often it becomes clear later that the schedule is impossible to meet. It is better to be realistic at the outset and be clear about what can be delivered and what cannot. Productive time may only amount to 3.5 to 4 days each week and time needs to be built in for meetings, communication, co-ordination and the normal line-management arrangements. You will also need to allow some extra time for contingencies such as unexpected interruptions and eventualities that cannot be predicted.
SMART objectives
When the objectives are identified, trying to ensure that each objective is SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timebound) is good practice or at least to have considered the extent to which these conditions could be met. As in all planning, this process is continuous and as new information becomes available and as the project progresses, changes will need to be made to aspects of the objectives and to the sequences of tasks that contribute to achievement of the completed project.

23. Work Breakdown Structure
Identify the major task categories
Identify sub-tasks, and sub-sub-tasks
Use verb-noun to imply action to something
Example: Getting up in the morning
Hit snooze button
Hit snooze button again
Get outa bed
Avoid dog
Go to bathroom…

24. Work Breakdown Structure
A work breakdown structure enables:
the work of a project to be divided into ‘packages’;
these ‘packages’ can be further subdivided into ‘elements’;
these elements are then divided into individual ‘tasks’. (Work Package –based on Statement of Work – SOW)

25. WBS Basis for estimating the time and effort required.
Work to be allocated to teams or team members so that they could identify and schedule the subtasks.
The deliverables identified in the work breakdown structure
WBS - Initial team-building tasks?
This structure provides a basis for estimating the time and effort required. In a large project, the work breakdown structure might allow packages of work to be allocated to teams or team members so that they could identify and schedule the subtasks. The deliverables can be identified in the work breakdown structure so that all the activities can be seen to contribute towards achieving the deliverables. Involving the project team in constructing the work breakdown structure can be one of the initial team-building tasks and can provide the first opportunity to develop an understanding of the whole project.

27. Work Breakdown Structure

28. Work Breakdown Structure

29. Work Breakdown Structure

30. Work Breakdown Structure

31. Work Breakdown Structure

32. Work Breakdown Structure

33. Work Breakdown Structure
Requires structured brainstorming

34. WBS Dictionary A companion document to the WBS
May have detailed content of the components contained in a WBS, including work packages and control accounts
For each WBS component, the WBS dictionary includes a code of account identifier, a statement of work, responsible organization, and a list of schedule milestones
Can include a list of associated schedule activities, resources required, and an estimate of cost
Each WBS component is cross-referenced, as appropriate, to other WBS components

35. Planning Consists of Subdivision of Work Quantification
Sequencing of Work
Budgeting
Scheduling

36. Example goals Write a book
Write a textbook on Engineering Economics suitable for sophomores.
Write a textbook on Engineering Economics suitable for sophomores. The book should be less than 300 pages in length, be supported by Excel spread sheets and contain all material needed for the FE exams.

37. Project Planning Terminology -1-
Tasks - the activities or steps needed to complete a project.
Subtask - a task that is subordinate to another task.
Summary tasks - General headings with subtasks. Summary tasks provide an outline structure that identifies a project’s major phases.
Successor - A task that follows another task.

38. Project Planning Terminology -2-
Milestone - a clearly identifiable or condition that marks the completion of a task, summary task, or project.
Resources - the people, material, equipment, or facilities required to complete a task, summary task, or project.

39. Project Planning Terminology -3-
Predecessor - A task that must precede another task.
Duration - The amount of time required to complete a task. Can be measured in real time, work time, or both.
Critical tasks - Tasks that, if delayed, would result in the delay of the project.
Critical path - The sequence of critical tasks.

40. Project Planning Terminology -4-
Gantt Chart - A graphical representation of the project schedule containing bars that represent tasks. The length of a bar corresponds to the task duration.
Date line - A vertical line on the Gantt representing the date.
Outline - A format to view Gantt charts where a hierarchical structure is established for a project. Subtasks are indented under summary tasks.

41. A Gantt Chart
Gantt charts show all the key stages of a project and their duration as a bar chart, with the time-scale across the top. The key stages are placed on the bar chart in sequence, starting in the top left-hand corner and ending in the bottom right-hand corner (Figure – Gantt chart for directory production). A Gantt chart can be drawn quickly and easily and is often the first tool a project manager uses to provide a rough estimate of the time that it will take to complete the key tasks. Sometimes it is useful to start with the target deadline for completion of the whole project, because it is soon apparent if the timescale is too short or unnecessarily long. The detailed Gantt chart is usually constructed after the main objectives have been determined.
In this example, key stage K (‘organise distribution’) starts at week 23 so that its end-point coincides with key stage L (‘distribute directory’). However, K could begin as early as week 17, as soon as key stage J is completed. Key stage K is therefore said to have slack. Key stage H (‘agree print contract’), has been placed to end at week 12. However, it could end as late as week 22, because key stage I (‘print directory’), does not begin until week 23. Key stage H is therefore said to have float. Float time can be indicated on the chart by adding a line ahead of the bar to the latest possible end-point. Slack and float show you where there is flexibility in the schedule, and this can be useful when you need to gain time once the project is up and running.
You can add other information to a Gantt chart, for example:
milestones – if you have special checkpoints, you can show them by using a symbol such as a diamond or triangle;
project meetings could be indicated by another symbol such as a circle;
reviews of progress could be indicated by a square.
For a complex project you may decide to produce a separate Gantt chart for each of the key stages. If you do this shortly before each key stage begins, you will be able to take any last-minute eventualities into account. These charts provide a useful tool for monitoring and control as the project progresses.

42. Template

43. Project Planning,
Session 2,
Tomorrow