Why Planning Is So Important for a Successful Project

Planning a project is critical for the success of any project. An important part of this planning exercise is to understand the process itself along with key deliverables that result. The following are some of these key processes, deliverables, and questions you should be aware of during this process.

One of these is a plan for dealing with risk and issues: knowing how to manage risk, and if risk occurs, how to identify it, mitigate it, and who is the actual point person that makes those important decisions? And as for the issues, the plan identifies how they will be managed and tracked, at what point they are to be escalated, and who the important decision makers are.

Another outcome of the planning process is to define the change management process. We all know change will happen. It's important to know upfront what processes will be used to manage those changes, how changes will come, how they will be assessed, and who the people are who need to decide how to manage those changes.

An additional plan includes decisions around procuring resources and assets for the team. Will you get those in house, or from key vendor partners? What is the process? What are the approval levels that need to be made at what time?

Finally, plans that identify cost management measures and schedules are important to establish. How will you manage and measure cost? The schedule will be baselined, but what happens when the schedule changes, how will you manage that?

The project plan, with all its sub plans, is valuable because it actually becomes the team's game plan that feeds into the executing and controlling phase of the project. The project charter maintains the baseline; it's the approval for the project, defines what the project is, what the budget is, and serves to keep the project on track. We find that so many projects fail because people aren't tracking the baseline against the original charter, the original plan.

When we begin actually executing the plan and controlling the process, performance reports become an integral part of measuring progress against baselines. Performance reports show where the team is at in terms of project progress, and if original goals are not being met, force us to look at what needs to be done to get back in line and steps necessary to actually change the project plan, modify the baseline and get the appropriate approvals. If we do that, we can decrease the project failure rate by actually implementing project management best practices.

Issues and risk logs are important for not only tracking purposes to know when they occur, and what issues and risks occurred, but also to know what action was taken, and who actually approved or signed off on the action. The same goes for change logs. As mentioned previously, change will occur. Logging changes that occur, what decisions were made and by whom are key elements of the change logs.

Project progress is knowing how you are doing against the baseline of the project. In the executing and controlling phase of the project lifecycle, deliverables are now actually being produced. The ultimate deliverable is the actual project, but the performance reports, the project progress, the project logs and deliverables as the project comes to a close all feed into the closing part of the project.

While not an exhaustive list, the above are key elements needed to keep your projects on track and within budget

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