Understanding a PMI Project Plan

Written by: Misty Faucheux • Edited by: Jean Scheid
Published May 6, 2010 • Related Guides: Project Management Institute

Need to write a project plan and just not sure what's involved? We've all been there. So, to help you write your next PMI project plan, we have broken down all the major components to make it easier on you!

Developing a Project Management Plan

Developing a project management plan requires some foreknowledge as to what major components are involved. The Project Management Institute (PMI) generally defines a project management basic plan as a plan the covers how the project will be implemented, examined, and controlled. Basically, a project management plan needs to cover everything involved in a project to ensure that it will be successful.

Project Plan Components

PMI project plans can be as simple as a one page overview of the above issues or a many page document intimately detailing everything involved in the project. According to PMI, any additional documents are known as subsidiary planning

Source: http://www.controlcenter.com/Portals/0/ProjectManagementPlan(Project).jpg

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documents. Whether in a one page summary or within multiple pages, the following components must be covered by any PMI project plan:

Project Overview
Project Charter Summary
Management advice, guidance, and instruction
Scope - Work breakdown, deployment, change control, and training
Detailed Plans
Scheduling – Who will be responsible for what and how will time be managed?
Cost Analysis – Estimating how much the project will cost and what factors could adversely affect those estimates
Cost Management
Risk Management – What activities will be taken to deal with risk?
Risk Log – Record of known and possible risks
Resources – Staffing, budget, and vendors.
Change Management
Issue Management – How will issues be managed and recorded, using an issue log, for example
Communication Plan – How will you communicate internally to the team and externally to stakeholders?
Quality Control – Approaches that must be taken to ensure that quality is maintained throughout the project
Procurement – How will needed goods and/or services be obtained?
Compliance

While these components are general to every project, the subsidiary documents allow teams to take individual components and tie them to the current project. The details of these documents should reflect how each part pertains to the project at hand.

Project Integration Management

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Another part of a PMI project plan is dealing with the management on the integration phase of a project. Project integration involves taking the above components and applying them. So, if you’re looking at cost analysis, you need to figure out how things like planning, scheduling, risk management, and other components will affect that cost.

A large part of your project development plan will have to address project integration management. According to PMI, project integration management involves the processes and tasks that are required to define and combine all the processes and tasks in order to finish the project.

Project integration management involves the following project management components:

Resource leveling, figuring out what processes or tasks have higher priority or are critical to the completion of the project
Risk management
Dealing with problems before they fail
Work coordination
Change requests

When developing a project management plan, it is important to consider project integration management because it helps identify problems before they cause the project to go off-budget, off-schedule or fail completely. This is done by the way project integration looks at how processes and tasks should be working together and how they affect each other whether it's good or bad.

Change Requests

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Change requests also need to be considered in the beginning of a PMI project plan. As tasks either get ahead or fall behind, the project environment is going to change. So, plan for it. Change requests are generally written documents, forms or just pieces of paper explaining why a change is needed. Have some pre-established change requests forms in the project management plan. And, when a change happens, go ahead and update the project management plan. While you do want to try to stick to the original plan, change is going to happen so the plan has to have some fluidity.