The Planning Piece of Project Management

We’ve all heard the famous Benjamin Franklin quote: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” In the project world, it can be easy to bypass the planning phase especially if you feel your schedule will take care of your milestones, your start and finish events, and provide information for a positive or negative Schedule Variance. However, planning and scheduling are two separate activities, both important, and both need to be present for a successful project.

The types of schedules a project manager would typically utilize are a waterfall schedule, a Gantt chart, critical path method, line of balance, resource leveling, and an agile based schedule which allows for changing requirements and priorities.

The schedule can provide the following:

1.)     Dependencies: start – finish, start – start, finish-start, and finish -finish

2.)     Critical path: The longest path for project completion

3.)     Milestones: These can include material payment milestones or completion of critical events that leads to overall project completion.

4.)     Resource loading: Shows the required amount of labor to complete each task

5.)     Reporting: Can assist your project financials when it comes time to report your earned value metrics.

However, the schedule does NOT provide the following:

1.)     “What-If” situations such as

a.        What happens if your material from a supplier comes in as non-conforming?

b.        What happens if you didn’t order enough material, or the supplier cannot deliver on-time?

c.        What happens if your resources get moved to another project with a company-wide priority?

d.        What happens if your customer changes the scope?

These types of situations should be planned for prior to the kickoff. To be even more efficient, these situations should be discussed during the proposal phase of the contract to properly bid for any unknowns that may occur during the execution phase of the project.

Planning starts with your lessons learned document from your previous project with a similar scope. Learn what issues came about, what challenges presented themselves, and what were the mitigation responses to each issue. Discuss what you learn with your team members who were on the previous projects to gain a deeper understanding of any note-worthy situation.

With this knowledge, create a section in your project kickoff of what could go wrong. Discuss what has gone wrong in the past, ask each team member what could go wrong in the future, and question how to handle the unknown unknowns. Accepting the fact that your project could go sideways at any moment in time for any reason is critical to planning how to combat the problem.

On the admin side of your project, you should plan how you create your Integrated Master Schedule (IMS) before development. How will you divide out your work packages and tasks and what kind of timelines do you need are all questions that should be addressed. This type of information also comes from historical projects as well as full discussions with your Subject Matter Experts (SME). Under each work package and task, you can assign the resources required to complete the work and list out how many hours each month they will potentially utilize.

You should also plan for the likelihood of the following:

1.)     Sharing labor resources – Most employees work across multiple projects, and since there is a limited amount of time through each project, you need to plan to secure their time on your project to fulfill the required amount of work.

2.)     Sick and personal days – People get sick…it’s a fact of life. People are also allowed personal time off. Usually, the more tenured the employee is, the more time they will have to utilize throughout the year. Always understand their planned time off and bake it into your resource loaded schedule.

3.)     Holidays – There are 11 Federal Holidays in the United States. Some companies honor all of them, and some a portion. Your scheduling tool should account for these days off, but you need to plan for the fact that most people will take a day or two off around a holiday to extend their time off.

4.)     Moral swings – There are some projects that take the life out people. Things go wrong every week, and once you fix an issue, two more issues pop up. It’s easy to come to work with a lower amount of enthusiasm than when things are smooth and easy-going. The less output each employee gives, the more your schedule pushes to the right.

5.)     Disputes between teammates – Teammates, especially in those tough times, will tend to turn on each other. They’ll place blame, not go out of their way to help one another, and will start gossiping. This kills your productivity and your schedule. It’s incredibly hard to plan for such an event and even not something you want to do as a project leader, but emotions can rise in tough times, and it needs to be taken in account.

Developing a strong schedule is critical to your project success. However, there will be many times after you spend hours scheduling out events and milestones that once you hit the “save” button, your schedule is wrong because some issue unexpectantly came out of nowhere. You must plan for this situation. Even if you don’t have a strong mitigation, you still must be aware that unknown unknowns will arise. It’s common for problems to happen but it should be unacceptable to be blindsided of the fact that they happened.