GUIDELINES FOR WRITING PROJECT PLANS

If you are charged with writing a Project Plan then the following should help to ensure that you make the best possible job of it. (This is presented as an alternative to the one in the Introduction to Part 2.) Your plan should contain the following elements:

1. Table of contents.

2. Management summary.

3. Statement of what is to be done. (The goal of the project.)

4. Deliverables. (Also part of the goal.) These may come under a number of headings:

   • Software

   • Hardware

   • Documentation

   • Services

5. Completion criteria. How do we know when the project is over? (A key part of the goal.)

6. Acceptance criteria. How does our customer decide the project is over? (Also a key part of the goal.)

The next nine items are all part of the plan and the backup plan.

7. Work breakdown structure. A list of all the jobs that have to be done to complete the project together with estimates of their associated effort and any assumptions made.

8. A Gantt chart. Showing the WBS phased over time, and stating any assumptions made. The Gantt chart should also show clearly the critical path of the project.

9. A breakdown of the effort and schedule in the project by project phase.

10. Milestones. A list of key dates extracted from the Gantt chart.

11. Resources required. Human and otherwise .

12. Resource loading. How the resources are phased over time and how the availability of people's time has been calculated.

13. Project budget (optional). Derived from the effort in the WBS and the section on resources.

14. Project organization chart. Among other things, this serves to identify the project leader.

15. Backup plan/margin for error. Sometimes called risk analysis. The project plan represents a prediction of how things will go in the future with regard to this project. The intention of this section is to show that the author of the plan has given some thought to what she will do when what happens in reality differs from the project plan.