Scoping a Project

Top Level Plan

"No plan survives the first contact with the enemy" - Sun Tzu in The Art of War

Planning is one of the main secrets to successful project implementation. In the first place, during the planning stage a good plan enables the Project Manager to analyse how the work needs to be carried out and identify the options. In the second place, during the implementation stage it provides a "baseline" to enable the Project Manager to judge whether the project is on course or not and thus control it.

To do this in practice, you need to focus on the project and draw up a complete list of the activities and tasks to be carried out showing the people or sections who would need to do them. Then chart these activities using either a Critical Path analysis network, a Gantt chart, or milestone plan.

With this chart, talk to the people who would need to be involved about their contribution and to get their ideas, their estimates of time involved, and their availability. Continue this until you have a fairly complete map of the project. During this process you will start to identify possible difficulties and blockages and should become clear as to which activities are the critical ones – those, which could delay the whole project.

Having done that, simply get the team and other contributors to talk and think about what needs to be done, and then use charts to communicate that to others.

Planning Sheets, Milestone Plans and Gantt Charts

You will almost certainly need to use one of the following planning techniques to plan your project.

Planning Sheets simply list the activities to be carried out with key data.
Critical Path Analysis links the activities together to form a network. To use this technique you will most likely need to have received training in it.
Stages Plan lays out the progress in a series of stages
Milestone Plans focus mainly on the end-dates by which something needs to be complete or by which certain objectives need to be achieved.
Bar or Gantt Charts focus more on the activities to be carried out to complete the project.

Each technique has its strengths and weaknesses and you need to select the technique most suited to your particular project. Each is illustrated below.

Planning Sheet
Activity	Date Activity can Start	Date Activity must Finish by	Estimated Duration	People and Resources involved	Estimated cost in time or resources

Critical Path Analysis

Stages Plan

Gantt Chart

May	June	July	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	Jan

Milestone (End-Date) Plan


April	May	June	July	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	Jan