SCMI - Project Management
Go back to the previous page
Project Planning
Click to go to the next page
 

“Failing to plan is planning to fail” is an annoying old adage but it is an important lesson to remember. There is often a tendency to get on with the action but time and time again experience shows that spending more time planning brings benefits in bringing in projects on time. So to speed up - slow down. Project planning involves determining the cost and duration of the project and the level of resources that it will need. In more detail, it involves identifying the start and finish times of individual activities within the project. The five stages of project planning are: identifying activities, estimating times and resources, identifying relationships and dependencies between activities, identifying time and resource schedule constraints, fixing the final schedule. Even the most meticulous plans will need changing along the way but without a robust plan in the first place coping with the inevitable changes is even more difficult. Tools such as MS Projects are often used to plan and to present the plan to others but the basic building blocks are brain power, flip charts, experience and sheer hard work.