Project Plan

The project plan is a suite of documents that the producer uses to estimate costs, track progress, maintain the schedule, and estimate profitability.

1. Manpower plan. This is a spreadsheet that lists when all the internal people connected to the project come on board, and when they finish up. Here is a drastically simplified version:

2. Resource plan. This spreadsheet lists all the external costs of the project and when they will be incurred. The external costs appropriate to the preceding manpower plan might look something like this:

   ‚	January	February	March	April	May	June	Total
   3 DevKits	10000	10000	10000	‚	‚	‚	30000
   2 Debug Kits	‚	‚	1000	1000	‚	‚	2000
   Art Tool #1 (2)	‚	5000	5000	‚	‚	‚	10000
   Art Tool #2 (4)	‚	1000	1000	‚	‚	‚	2000
   Bug Tracking Tool	‚	‚	5000	150	‚	‚	5150
   ‚	‚	‚	‚	‚	‚	‚
   Composer	‚	‚	‚	‚	5000	‚	5000
   Voice	‚	‚	‚	5000	5000	‚	10000
   ‚	‚	‚	‚	‚	‚	‚	‚
   Total Ext Costs	10000	16000	22000	6150	10000		54150

3. Project tracking doc. This is usually a Gantt chart generated by the producer using project management software. Each department head supplies a list of tasks, along with the people assigned to them and how long they think the tasks will take. With this information, the producer can see if the project is on schedule, what the critical path to completion is, which resources are overloaded, etc.

4. Budget. This is a spreadsheet of all the costs associated with the project. Line items will include the following.

5. Internal personnel costs (salaries of people applied to the project)

   1. Hardware costs

   2. Software licenses

   3. External contractor fees

   4. Engine royalties

   5. IP acquisition costs (license fee)

   6. Marketing & PR costs

   7. An overhead multiplier that applies fixed costs (building rent, utilities, travel, personnel benefits, etc.) to the project

   8. Profit-and-Loss (P&L) statement. This is another spreadsheet that the publisher uses to estimate the profitability of each project. The projected lifecycle sales estimates from the sales team are compared to the costs from the preceding budget to determine if the game will make enough money to justify the investment.

6. Development schedule. This table breaks out the stages of development, with significant events along the way:

   Event	Date
   Concept phase	00/00/00 - 00/00/00
   Start preproduction	00/00/00
   Start development	00/00/00
   Milestone #1	00/00/00
   Milestone #2	00/00/00
   ‚ (Additional milestones) ‚	00/00/00
   Alpha	00/00/00
   Beta	00/00/00
   Localization deliverable #1	00/00/00
   Pre-submission (console only)	00/00/00
   First submission (console only)	00/00/00
   Second submission (console only)	00/00/00
   Code freeze	00/00/00
   Release to manufacture (RTM)	00/00/00
   Shelf date	00/00/00

7. Milestone definitions. Here, the deliverable for each milestone is specified in detail, along with the date it's due.

   Milestone	Date
   Milestone #1. General description Deliverable #1 Deliverable #2 Deliverable #3	‚
   ‚	00/00/00
   Milestone #2. General description Deliverable #1 Deliverable #2 Deliverable #3	‚
   ‚	00/00/00
   Milestone #3. General description Deliverable #1 Deliverable #2 Deliverable #3	‚
   ‚	00/00/00
   Etc.	Etc.