Planning: All About Project Management and Step by Step Guide for Project Planning

Project Management is an approach to manage the business activities which embrace change and complexity on a continuous basis.  Change and complexity are the two major features of today’s business environment.

Planning is considered as a vital step in the project management life cycle.  The purpose of the project planning is to establish a clear set of goals considering needs and expectations of stakeholders, to create a list of project deliverables, to estimate project schedule in terms of time, effort, and to allocated resources as required.  The process of planning provides an overall framework of the entire process which will benefit the management to have a better overview over the project.

There are multiple factors which lead to the success and failure of a project.  Commonly cited factors which lead to the project failures are lack of stakeholder engagement, lack of communication, and absence of clear roles and responsibilities to team members.  These factors need to be addressed during the early stage of project planning.  In order to achieve this, a few supporting plans can be created as a part of the Project Planning process which are Staffing Plan, Communications Plan, and Risk Management Plan.

Staffing includes identifying individuals and describes their roles and responsibilities on the project.  Communication plan includes creating a document showing who needs to be kept informed about the project, and how they will receive the information and how frequently.  The progress report will update how the project is performing, milestones achieved and work planned for next period.  Risk management plan outlines identifying as many risks as possible and being prepared to manage them.

The preparation of the project plan template is the culmination of the planning phase.  The Project plan summarizes the results of the Project planning process into a brief document to be signed off by the Project Sponsors and any other key stakeholders.  The Project Plan is the basis for monitoring and controlling the project.  All changes to the project must be recorded against the project plan.

Smart Admin provides suitable framework for project planning, scheduling, selection of resources, costing, allocation of tasks, and for further monitoring of project progress.  The tools for Smart Admin is developed to support documentation for staffing, communication, task creation, task approval, and recording of begin date with date of completion date along with the expected deliverable.

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