Assembling the Project Plan
Explore how to assemble a detailed project plan as a technical project manager. Learn to organize tasks, capture requirements, set durations, manage resource swarming, and define task dependencies to create a flexible plan that adapts throughout a project's lifecycle. Understand buffering and fast-tracking techniques to improve planning accuracy and responsiveness.
We'll cover the following...
The evolving nature of a project plan
The project plan is a living document that goes through multiple phases during the life of the project. In the beginning, it is strictly a plan—it marks the planned path to get from these early stages to the end. However, as the project begins, it will start capturing real-time data called actuals: actual start date, actual completion date, as well as actual resourcing. For now, we’ll focus on the early version of the project plan because this form of the plan is what leads to later versions.
There are a few key pieces of data that we need to gather for any project. Aside from the standards (task description, duration, and predecessors), we’ll want to capture the requirements that it satisfies. Though we showed this as a separate chart—and it can be a separate exercise—having a central sheet to see all of the important data is very useful and reduces the churn of cross-referencing, which can lead to mistakes.
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