Driving Clarity from Requirements to Planned Work

In this chapter, we’ll delve deeper into the key management areas we discussed earlier, starting with plan management. We’ll build on the Mercury program example to inspect all stages of creating a plan at both the project and program levels.

We’ll dive into plan management by exploring the following:

• Driving clarity from requirements to planned work

• Planning resources in a technology landscape

• Exploring the differences between a project and a program

Let’s start planning!

The significance of clarity in plan management

Previously, we discussed the importance of driving clarity in all aspects of a project or program. Out of all of the areas where driving clarity is needed, plan management is the most important.

When writing a project plan, we might find ourselves asking why.

Author's experience: Why are we doing this? Every time I'm writing a project plan, I ask myself this, even though crafting these documents is among the aspects of project management I find most enjoyable.

The answer to why we do it is simple: it enables us to be a force multiplier. We know the work that needs to be done and so does everyone else. The team spends less time on determining what and when and instead focuses on how to achieve the tasks and goals. Driving clarity in requirements early on takes less time than correcting the issue later in execution as this can lead to bad estimations due to poor understanding, which results in longer timelines.

The first step in driving clarity in your requirements and beginning your project plan is choosing the right tool or making full use of the tools you have. Let’s explore some of the project management tools available.

Project management tools

The project plan is one of the most crucial artifacts for your project. This includes many aspects, which we’ll cover in this lesson, such as the task list, resourcing, and predecessors that combine to produce a Gantt chart of the project timeline. This is a lot of work to do and there are several tools out there that can help you do it.

Author’s experience

Through my interviews with industry leaders, I confirmed something I suspected was true all along—there is no standard tool in project management. It often comes down to personal preference and the constraints placed by your company, usually related to security concerns arising from your company data being stored on cloud servers.

Nonetheless, I do have a list of tools and feature comparisons to help drive home the variability in the marketplace that exists today. I can say, though, that the one and only tool that was used at every company that I interviewed for this book was Microsoft Excel.

I must confess that I also use Excel from time to time, for instance, for the plans in this book! Sometimes keeping it simple and in a well-known format is the best way to go. You lose a lot of functionality that you'll find in dedicated project management tooling, but you are also free from their preconceived notions of what project management must be.

Taking a step up in functionality, Microsoft Project is ubiquitous in the industry—at least in name. It is certainly the standard in regard to features that other tools emulate and is a good introduction to purpose-built tools for project management. However, it doesn’t span multiple projects easily, so for program or portfolio management, tools geared toward portfolio management are best.

I use a portfolio management tool in my day-to-day program management so I can easily track multiple projects and build a program roadmap. I often start in Excel because the resource constraints on how project tasks are planned in most tools do not fit well with how my team handles resourcing. I’ll get into this a bit more later in the chapter.

Comparison of portfolio and program management tools

In the table below, we’ve listed some tools, though certainly not all tools, that cover portfolio and program management and some high-level features for comparison. Again, it comes down to personal preference and company need but hopefully, this list can get you familiar with the tools that are in use across the industry and help you decide which tools work best for you.