MCPc Blog

Plan Your Projects Like You Plan Your Dinner: Mixing Dinner, IT and Project Management

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Would you consider your last dinner party a success?  What is completed on time and on budget?  Did it meet your expectations and those of your stakeholder (i.e. your date, spouse or family)?  

If not, what went wrong? Did you shop too late to get choice selections? Did you even make a list? Did you laminate your plan to protect against a messy counter? (I have actually done this.) Did you forget a key ingredient? Did the presentation resemble the photograph you were attempting to emulate? And finally, did the meal taste as good as the reviews suggested?

Wouldn't it be remarkable if just one thing could ensure a successful dinner, or IT project for that matter? There is, in fact, an often overlooked step that can make or break any project: a well thought-out plan. 

Here, we will examine what steps, precautions, processes, tools and techniques within each project phase are a must to ensure a successful project — success being defined as the proverbial on-time and on-budget, plus achieving the client's business objectives.

At MCPc, we follow a six-step project delivery methodology, so I will use this framework for the discussion. 

In addition, it's important to consider two more steps after project delivery, listed below as steps 7 and 8. 

1. Plan
2. Define
3. Design
4. Build
5. Deploy
6. Close
7. Optimize
8. Steady-State

The importance of Project Planning

So, to continue with the dinner analogy: if you prepared a nice meal recently, how much time did you spend planning it, compared with how long it took to actually prepare the meal?

My last big dinner was for Valentine's Day. I spent hours researching, reading reviews and contemplating alternatives (what would I do if snow prevented me from accessing the grill?) before building my grocery list. This is analogous to the requirements-gathering process for any project.

The way to make a project successful in all aspects is to plan it carefully, not just to start work quickly.

The Plan Phase should identify the scope of the project, define the rules the project will follow and generate a schedule for the major tasks of the project.

And, please don't confuse a project plan with a Gantt chart.

The project plan is the project keystone. It unifies all other management controls and gives the project coherence. Your plan should define:

• Project scope and objectives
• Planning assumptions, constraints, and risks
• Time management and reporting
• Cost management and controls
• Quality management and policy
• Human resource plans and organization
• Communication channels and strategy
• Risk management
• Issues management

The plan phase must contain processes and checks to help ensure that defined goals and objectives — not activities — drive the way a project is managed.  Objectives for the project must be quantifiable, concrete, documented, and accepted before the project team begins work.

Really, the most important aspect of the plan phase is to slow down, and take a thoughtful approach that respects and maintains a project tempo while still carefully crafting the project's quantifiable goals and objectives, as well as other management controls.

I challenge you to try this approach on your next project. Encourage your team to create clear deliverables before launching into the next phase in your delivery methodology.

Your thoughts:

• What steps or processes do you insist on completing during the plan phase of your projects?
• What are the key deliverables of your plan phase?

Ira Grossman, VP, Personal Systems Group, has more than 15 years of technology project management experience and is an expert in lifecycle management and mobile device management for the enterprise, including the iPad. Connect with Ira on LinkedIn.