In the world of project management, many project managers follow the Project Management Body of Knowledge, or PMBOK.
PMBOK is a structured approach to project management, developed by the Project Management Institute, which includes five phases:
In this article, we'll look at the Planning phase.
Phase 2: Planning
Often the most time-consuming of the phases of project management, the Planning phase is where you lay your project groundwork. In Phase 1 - Initiation, you define your project deliverables through the Project Charter. Now, in Phase 2 - Planning, you create a specific list of things that need to happen in order
for your goal or goals to be met.
Your specific list of identifiable steps is documented in the form of tasks. Many project managers choose to come up with project tasks using a manual method -- such as a good, old-fashioned brainstorming session. A technique that seems to work well is to write tasks on individual sticky notes (such as
Post-It™ notes).
Then, once you have your tasks written down, begin to hang them in the order you think they will logically occur during your project. This type of format allows you to rearrange tasks and see the whole project laid out in a visual format.
Another great option for determining what tasks need to be done, and how long a task might take is to refer to past projects in which similar steps needed to be taken. Or, better yet, go talk to industry experts. Simply asking the people that will be doing the work (or who have done it in the past) how much time is needed to complete a task is enough to get a rough estimate.
In the project management world, there are formulas for calculating a task's estimated duration and many project management still make these calculations by hand. But, there are many handy project management software programs that can automatically make these calculations for you. Even at this early stage in the phases of project management, you can begin to enter your tasks into a project management program and allow the software to do the heavy arithmetic for you.
Once you know what needs to be done, you can use a calendar to determine when the work should be completed and a list of resources to assign your tasks to specific people. Tasks should be clear and simply stated. If a task cannot be described in a sentence or two or completed between two hours and two weeks, you might want to break it up into two or more smaller tasks.
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Phase 3: ExecutionRead more about
Phase 4: Monitoring and ControllingRead more about
Phase 5: ClosingRead more about
Phase 1: Initiation