5 ● THE PROJECT PLANA PROJECT MANAGER MUST CREATE A PLAN FOR A PROJ...

30.5

^●

The project plan

A project manager must create a plan for a project that specifies:

■

the final deadline

■

detailed tasks

■

intermediate milestones

■

the deliverables at each stage

■

who is involved and when

■

when project reviews are scheduled

■

the dependencies between the stages of the project.This plan must take account of the process model, the total predicted effort, thetools and methods, the team organization and the expected final deadline.The first and crucial step is to identify the major activities that are necessary. Forexample, if the waterfall model is adopted, these are requirements analysis, architectur-al design, coding, unit testing, system testing. An estimate of the person weeks for eachof these stages is made. (It should add up to the total estimate for the project.) Next,these major stages are broken down into smaller tasks, and figures for effort assigned.This planning is not easy and is, at best, tentative, because it makes assumptions aboutthe outcomes of important design decisions which have not yet been made. Finally, therelationships and dependencies are specified. For example, coding of a module comesbefore testing it.The product of this planning is a detailed plan that shows all the activities that areneeded, the effort required for each and the dependencies between the activities.There are a number of notations, diagrams and tools that can assist in documentinga project plan:

■

Pert (Project Evaluation and Review Technique) chart – shows activities and theirinterrelationships

■

Gantt chart – shows resources (people) and what they are doing

■

Microsoft Project – a software package designed to assist in project planning andmonitoring

■

a spreadsheet package – can be used to describe a project plan, maintaining figuresabout tasks, their likely duration and their actual duration.