Project Planning

How important is planning to projects. Planning is the base of every process in projects to define the scope, desired results, and course of actions to attain these results. In project management lifecycle, planning is a phase in which the project team develop a project management plan. This plan is not only the schedule or gannet chart as wrongly understood by non-licensed or non-experienced managers, but as  stipulated  in PMBOK guide, it is an integrated processes among areas of scope, cost, resources, risks, stakeholder’s engagement, procurements, communications and quality in one plan that make a clear course of action for the implementation phase. when the project plan is completed in the initial phase of the project design, the accepted plan of the project management serves as a baseline of the project. Therefore, during the project implementation, the monitoring and controlling of activities compare the project performance against the baselines.

It said that failing in planning is planning for failure.  Most of the projects fail in the implementation because of the miss estimation of time, cost, scope and/or risks and resources. For example, if during the planning the estimated time was not realistic, a change will be required in the project schedule, that leads to changes in cost and resources during implementation. Consequently, unrealistic estimates during the planning, it increases the change occurrence in the execution phase that may affects the project performance during implementation. Moreover, change and configuration plans can be considered in the projects plan depending on the size, scope and nature of the project and the organization.

Finally, good planning must  entail  careful analysis of the external and internal factors that influence project. For example, when planning project cost, factors like organizational culture and structure, currency exchange rate, project management systems, financial controls procedures, reporting frequency , standard contract provisions, existing cost estimates and budgeting policies or procedures and historical information of lessons learnt should be considered to develop successful plan.