Your Project Plan: The Indispensable Tool

The project plan is the heart of project management. It defines the scope, resources, and schedule in one place, thus enabling you to keep these factors in balance throughout your project. A project plan spells out factors such as exactly how many and what tasks need to be done, who’s going to do each task, the estimated cost of each task and of the entire project, the task sequence, dependencies between tasks, the estimated duration of each task, and the length of the overall project.

To put together an effective project plan, you need to:

Identify all the project tasks and who or what will do them.
Get work and time estimates for tasks, preferably from the people directly responsible for those tasks.
Determine task dependencies. For example, find out if one task can’t start until another finishes, if several tasks must start at the same time, or if two tasks must finish at around the same time.
Enter task and project constraints. For example, you might want a task to begin on a certain date.

The more accurate your information, the more accurate your plan.