“If you don’t know where you are going, how can you expect to get there?” - Basil S. Walsh
Project planning is an essential, unskippable part of project management. This blog will teach you everything you need to know about creating a robust project plan, plus provide a simple project planning template at the end.
What is project planning?
Project planning is the process of designating resources and setting goals to be completed within a certain time frame. The result of project planning is a project plan - a master document that guides how the project will be run. Included in the project plan are a:
- Resource Management Plan
- Risk Management Plan
- Communication Plan
- Change Management Plan
- Financial Plan
Why is project planning important?
To answer this question, let’s talk about the inverse for a minute - not project planning. If you’ve ever run or been a part of an unplanned project, you know about missed deadlines, budget overruns, and unhappy team members and stakeholders.
Project planning effectively avoids these problems as much as possible. A project plan is a thought-out guide that presents realistic, fact-based, and experience-based information. Armed with this information, you can go into a project confident that you are starting out in the best way possible.
Let’s narrow that down to 8 benefits of project planning:
- Accountability: A project plan clearly defines responsibilities, effectively eliminating excuses for tardiness and sloppy work.
- Less stress: It’s stressful to be told to do something without being told how to do it. A project plan stops your team from fumbling in the dark and wasting energy trying to figure out something that should have been clearly defined at the outset.
- Unity: A project plan means everyone works towards a common goal. Team members can clearly see how their work affects their colleagues' work and how everyone’s work comes together to reach a goal.
- Deadlines are met: It’s one thing to have a vague idea of when the project is ultimately due and quite another to have a timeline that breaks the projects down into incremental, project-planning steps. A project plan enables you to see if the project is going according to the timeline, and if not, you’ll have enough advance warning to shift things around and ultimately meet the end deadline.
- Balances resources: Part of project planning is resource allocation. Using resource management tools, you can fit the project requirements around everyone’s schedule, keeping in mind other projects that you could be working on simultaneously, as well as holidays and personal leave. This prevents team members from overloading with work and, more importantly, not being allocated enough work.
- Good communication: One of the components of a project plan is a communication plan, which details how and when communication should occur. This prevents bottlenecks, under-communication, and over-communication.
- Avoids scope creep: Scope creep derails projects by making you run overtime and over budget. This can be avoided with a project plan that includes a scope management plan. A scope management plan preempts problems that arise when stakeholders request project changes.
- Mitigates risk: Project management is a risky business. So many things could go wrong; inevitably, some will go wrong. A risk management plan in your project plan plans ahead for as many possible risks as possible so that you don’t get thrown off kilter when they happen. A risk management plan also helps you avoid risks in the first place, as when you think about what could go wrong, you can plan what to do to avoid mishaps.
What is the project planning process?
- Write an executive summary: An executive summary is like a project plan outline. It should explain in a nutshell how you plan on solving your client’s problem or providing them with the deliverables they are requesting.
- Decide on deliverables: This needs to be discussed with stakeholders beforehand. Once you have agreed upon the deliverables and their contents, you can write them in the project management plan.
- Plan milestones and goals:Milestones are points of considerable achievement in the project duration, and goals are what you are trying to achieve overall in the project, e.g., driving more traffic to a website.
- Plot timeline: A visual guide depicting when milestones and deliverables must be achieved.
- Create a resource management plan: How many team members will you need for the project, and what materials will you require?
- Create a communication plan: How should team members and stakeholders communicate with each other, and how often? Get this all down clearly in the project management plan.
- Create a change management project plan: How do you react when a client asks for a change in scope or timeline? A change management plan (similar to a project scope management plan) preempts these problems and helps you deal with them effectively.
- Create a project risk management plan: It’s always good to have a contingency plan in project management to preempt potential risks.
- Decide on a budget: Consider all the resources needed for the project. Work out the total sum and record how much should be designated for each part of the project.
Project Planning Template
Rather than reinventing the wheel every time you embark on a new project, use our template for project planning.
You can access it for free here.
How can Workamajig help you with your project planning?
Workamajig’s project management software is built just for creative teams and offers all the project planning tools you need.
Use our project planning software to:
- Know the full story with a real-time daily feed of all project updates.
- See all items needing attention in one place with budget and timeline warnings.
- Create, customize & export reports plus built-in Gantt & burn charts for your visual learners.
- Make manual project setup (and finicky spreadsheets) a thing of the past. With just a few clicks, you can create fully scheduled projects.
- Workamajig’s powerful project templates help you start your creative projects with ready-to-go schedules & resourcing needs.
- The flexibility you need. Copy from a template & edit to match your new project's needs.
- Easily view and manage new projects' exact resources, hours, and budgets.
- Visualize project tasks, dependencies, and complete timelines with built-in Gantt charts.
- And loads more!
Organize your marketing projects in one place from the very first touch.
