From the course: Project Management Foundations

Project planning overview

From the course: Project Management Foundations

Project planning overview

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- A big part of project management is planning out your project in detail. You begin by identifying the work that must be done. To make the project easy to manage, you break the work down into bite size pieces. Once you have your list of tasks, you can start estimating who's going to do the work, how long each task will take, and how much they'll cost. Figuring out when things happen requires some special techniques. To build a schedule, you have to take into account factors like how tasks depend on one another, how much resources are available to work on tasks and when those resources are available. Planning also includes how you'll run the project, how will the team communicate, with what tools and how often. You'll also put together other plans for managing change and risk, and what you'll do to ensure quality. All of this information goes into a set of documents that represent the project plan. The completed project plan doesn't get put on a shelf to gather dust. You use it over the life of the project to direct the people working on your project, to keep track of how the project is going, to correct course, and to communicate with stakeholders. Are you ready to build a project plan? We'll explore each component of a project plan in detail. Because a project schedule is a key component of your plan, an entire chapter is devoted to how you build one.

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