Creating a solid project plan is one of the most important steps
to making sure your project gets completed
on time and on budget.
In this video, digital project management consultant, writer,
and speaker, Brett Harned, will teach you
how to create a solid project plan in five simple steps.
Brett is a digital project management consultant
who focuses on solving issues that
are important to organizations who want to produce quality,
digital projects in harmony.
Project plans come in many different shapes
and sizes and formats.
A good project plan will represent the confluence
of many factors, including your scope,
your professional experience, the research you've done,
your process knowledge, and a ton of input
from your team and your client.
In this short tutorial, I'm going
to explain how we can pull together
a plan in five simple steps.
Any good plan is going to communicate major deliverables.
It's going to show the process by which you're going
to provide those deliverables.
It will communicate timing and deadlines and, of course,
an end date.
It will show dependencies.
And it's going to show team roles and assignments.
So let's go ahead and get started.
The first thing you're going to want to do
is a little bit of research and pre-planning.
A solid project plan is created after you've
done your research.
This can be done through work that you're
doing with your team, work that you're doing with stakeholders,
and any kind of research that you're
going to do based on your scope and your project requirements.
We're going to focus a little bit on stakeholder interviews.
My rule of thumb is to always attend stakeholder interviews
if they're a part of your project.
You can suggest any questions to be included so that you
can find out more about things like project goals, team
dynamics, and potential issues or risks
that you might face on your project.
You're going to want to dig a little bit deeper about project
ownership and decision making.
Those are the kinds of things that pop up midstream
in a project when you haven't done your research and kind
of throw things off track.
You're going to want to talk to your project's
PM on your client team about stakeholder interest and savvy.
This will help you to understand just
how well or smoothly a project will run through its process.
It will also tell you how much education you
need to do with your clients.
You're also going to talk about key dates or potential outages,
so if your clients are going on big corporate meetings,
or holidays, or anything like that.
You're going to talk about similar projects and the rate
of success that your clients have seen on those projects.
And try to apply some of the findings
that they had on those projects to your project.
And you're going to want to talk about your preferred modes
of communication.
So you're going to want to talk about how you'll message one
another, if you're going to do weekly status calls, and all
of those good things.
All of these things are going to impact your project plan.
Another thing you want to do, internally,
is to know your team.
Knowing your team is important on a number of levels,
but most importantly, knowing who's responsible for what
and when.
You're going to want to figure out
what the expertise is on your team-- what team members'
interests are, so what-- that will help you determine
who will work on what.
Also talk about collaboration and how people on your team
can get together to work together
to produce deliverables.
And then you want to talk about timing and other project
assignments.
You definitely want to consider other projects
that people are working on, because those assignments can
get in the way of the project that you're planning.
So the more pre-planning you can do to rule those things out,
the better off you'll be long term.
TeamGantt is web-based project scheduling
made simple and beautiful.
And because it's cloud based, there's no software to install,
and your data is automatically backed up.
You can draw each step of your plan on a timeline,
so everyone on your team can see which
tasks are assigned to them, and when they need to be completed.
And TeamGantt is built to be collaborative.
So you can have conversations with your team,
upload project-related files, and see the entire task history
all in one place.
You can even see how busy your team is,
so you can manage their time better.
Go to teamgantt.com/signup to create your free account today.
So your second step is going to be to draft your plan.
My process is always to start a little bit rough.
So rather than jumping right into TeamGantt,
I'll actually sit down with a notebook,
or maybe at a whiteboard, and start
thinking about what the general process is.
So with the team that I'm working with,
are we running an agile project?
Are we waterfall?
Is there some kind of a hybrid?
Just a high-level how people like to work.
Then I'll start to rough out what the deliverables will be.
For instance, if I'm working on a web design project,
I'll probably sort out if there's
a sitemap, wireframes design, and then
what level of code we're doing.
And then I think about sign-offs.
So at what points in the project will
I require someone to approve something?
And then I'll look at the resourcing plans
and how the team is resourced.
So if they're on one or two projects,
how are those projects playing together?
And what's their availability across those projects?
And then we'll look at deadlines.
Of course, every project has a deadline,
and you'll want to back all of your work into that deadline.
But it's smart to ask a couple of questions
about that deadline before you actually create a plan to meet
it, especially if it's tight.
If there is an event or something
that your client needs your site to be launched for
or your deliverable done by, you'll want to know about that.
And then you want to talk about stakeholder feedback
and timing.
How much time does your client team
need to actually approve and review deliverables?
That's a really important one, and it can extend deadlines
pretty often.
The next step would be to review your sketch with the team.
Before jumping into the tool, just taking
a rough sketch or an idea of how the project could
go to the team can go a really long way
in creating a really collaborative project
environment.
So, what you'll want to do is just call together
a 15, 20-minute meeting to talk through your ideas.
And then take notes on points where
your team might want to change the path of the project.
And be adaptable.
Be flexible.
What you want to do is create a process
that works for everyone, not just for you.
At TeamGantt, we want to teach and empower project managers
of all types, from the seasoned PM
vet who's managed every kind of team and project under the sun
to the rookie who didn't even realize they were a project
manager until last Tuesday.
No matter how much experience you have, you can always learn.
That's why we've put together free guides
to project management and project planning, as well
as Excel Gantt Chart templates.
Go to teamgantt.com/resources to download your free guides
and templates today.
So your next step is to create your formalized project
schedule.
Follow these tips to make a schedule that's
readable and acceptable for not only your team, yourself,
but also your clients.
First, you want to break tasks out into sections.
This will allow you to map tasks to a deliverable
and show actual effort on any project task.
Then you want to assign tasks to organizations.
This will be so people can see, very quickly, who
is responsible for what.
Then you want to take it one step further
and actually assign those tasks to people.
That's going to ensure accountability on your team.
From there, you want to show task start and end dates.
Again, this will show effort associated to each task.
And then you want to use notes to clarify tasks.
So, for instance, if you have a presentation,
you might want to make a note about what
will be presented, how long the meeting might take,
and then what the next steps are going to be after that meeting.
Notes can be really helpful when it
comes to helping to communicate how a project process will
operate.
You also want to call out dependencies.
This ensures that people understand
the decision-making process and how
those decisions could impact potential changes
on the project.
The next step is going to be to confirm, present, and then
confirm your plan again.
Sounds tricky, but it's super simple.
So first, you want to present to your team again.
Once you've got your plan in a more formal format,
you're going to want to show that to your team
because chances are, once you've moved it
into a format that shows actual dates, things might change.
And you want to confirm dates with your team
to make sure that things aren't falling on dates where they'll
be out, or they're responsible for something else.
Plus, it'll look more formal, and people will spend more time
actually looking at it and digging deeper
into the details.
Next, you want to present your plan to your clients.
So you can either send a link to the plan
or present a PDF to them.
Either way, you'll want to follow it up with a call,
so that you can walk them through the plan line by line.
This gives you a chance to help your clients understand
the overall process of the project,
and also show them how long it takes
to get some of your work done.
It's a really good chance for you to educate your clients,
and have them understand your work and the level of effort
it entails.
When you're on that call, you want
to be sure to point out review times, team work time,
dependencies on the project, and then holidays
and time off that you've accounted for.
It's also your chance to double-check with them,
or to triple-check with them, about holidays,
time off, or any kind of meeting schedule that they have.
From there, you'll want to confirm your plan.
Sure, you might make a few changes
after you've reviewed with the client.
But at that point, you want to confirm it, and lock it in,
and let them know-- this is the plan that we're
going to use moving forward.
From there, it's just up to you to manage and update your plan.
You'll have to remember that plans change constantly.
I like to tell clients that project plans are like living,
breathing documents.
Things will change.
Deadlines could possibly be missed.
People could be out sick for a week or two.
Changes could happen within your process,
or new stakeholders could join the team.
Anything can affect the way that a project goes down.
So as long as they know that you're handling the plan--
and you're making as many changes
as you need to throughout the course,
but you're staying on track-- and you're
honest about what will impact the deadlines or the end date,
then you'll be good.
Remember, you just have to adapt to that change.
Make the proper updates.
Communicate the changes, and then communicate the risks.
And your project plan will be living, breathing,
but also very solid.
This is the end of the tutorial.
Hopefully these steps will help you create great project
plans moving forward.
If you want to dig deeper, check out
the guide to project planning in the TeamGantt Learning Center.
Thanks again, and we'll see you soon.