Iterative project planning

So far we have described a number of steps for building a project plan, and they were described in an order that seems logical. First we work out what we are going to deliver, then we work out what tasks we need to do, then we group and order our tasks, then we work out how long each task will take.

It all makes perfect sense. But it probably won’t happen that way. Sure, you’ll work out what you are going to deliver and then think about what steps you need to take…but maybe that will make you re-think what you are going to deliver. When you get to grouping and ordering tasks, you might be reminded of a task that you forgot earlier. While you are estimating the duration of the tasks you may be prompted to re-think the way you ordered your tasks.

Planning is not always the kind of logical, step-by-step process it might initially appear:

• It is an iterative process, which means you will have to keep going back to the beginning and working through the process again, refining as you go.
• There is an element of creativity in planning, using your experience and imagination to predict what is needed and how best to achieve it.
• Each step is likely to help your thinking about other steps.
• You can keep refining each piece of the puzzle until you are happy with it.

For this reason, you might want to consider doing your early stages of planning in a very rough and ready way. Using paper and pencil, or a whiteboard can help to free your thinking in a way that staring at a computer based planning tool (such as MS Project) can’t. You can move faster, think quicker, make notes and scribble things out as you go. Brainstorming with others can also help to speed up your planning. It may be that you will finish your planning in a software tool, but try starting with a method that allows you to plan using broad brush strokes – it can save you a lot of time.

Identify Key Milestones

There are two definitions for ‘milestone’ (www.dictionary.com) ‘a stone functioning as a milepost’ and ‘a significant event or stage…’. Milestones were used to give travellers information about where they were, indicating how far back to a major town, how far to the next. The traveller could see how far they had travelled, and how far they had to go.

It is no surprise that the word has taken on that second meaning, where an event becomes an opportunity to look back, and look forward. And just as the traveller might use the milestone to make decisions about his journey (do I need to move faster, or spend the night right here) the milestone helps us to make decisions about our project’s progress.

Try to incorporate milestones in to your plan, so that you are able to use them to assess progress as you go. This means you don’t have to wait until the end of the project to see if you are on target. You can pause at your milestone and consider if you had expected to be there earlier, or later, and what you have learned on the way.

Milestones are often formed by your logical groups of tasks. For example, if you have finished all the tasks that are needed to build the foundations of your new house, that could be a significant event, a milestone for your project.

A milestone could be formed by the end of a project stage. For example, completing the design for your new house, could be a significant stage, before the build stage.

A milestone could also be somewhat arbitrary. If you need to build 100 widgets that you will use later in your project you might want to put a milestone half-way through, at 50 widgets, so you can test if you are on track. Or 20% through, 20 widgets.

You can determine what milestones make sense for you. Don’t have so few that you rarely get the opportunity to test your progress, nor so many that they are no longer significant. Use them to reflect, and if necessary re-plan. Use them also to celebrate success, reward yourself and your team, and refresh yourself before moving on the next milestone.

Now, with milestones added to your plan there is just one planning task left – working out what can go wrong.

Build Your Plan

At last, you get to build your plan. The basic project management tasks we have described so far have helped you to pull together all the things you need for your plan. You have answered the following questions:

• What will my project deliver?
• What tasks do I need to do?
• What groups of tasks are there?
• In what order should I do these tasks?
• How long will each of these tasks take?

Now you can build your plan by putting each task against a calendar. Decide on your start date, put the first task there. Use the duration of the task to work out when it will end, and that will give you the date you’re your second task can start. Chaining your tasks together like this gives you your plan.

Remember that some tasks, or groups of tasks, can be run at the same time as others. For example, one team could be working on landscaping your garden, while another team renovates your house.

A great way to picture your plan is using a Gantt chart. These charts show the tasks, with a representation of these tasks against a calendar. The simple example below shows a plan for a couple of jobs to improve a house: renovating a living room, and landscaping a garden. You can see there is some logic in the ordering of the tasks – before painting there is preparation of surfaces, before that removing furniture to clear space. You can also see the estimate of duration, and how these add together to give the overall duration of the project. The tasks for renovating the living room take eight days. The tasks for the landscaping also take eight days, but are run in parallel to the living room, so these tasks must be done by a different person or team.

 

You can also see in this example that the work will be done during the working week, Monday to Friday. Bear in mind that if your project is a personal project then your available time may be in evenings or at weekends. Your plan needs to reflect this – don’t assume you can put in a 40 hour working week on a home project if you still holding down a day job.

Oh, and don’t worry if you don’t have a fancy-schmancy project management tool to build your plan. Use paper and pen, the back of an old envelope, whiteboard, butcher’s paper and crayons. What the plan looks like doesn’t matter. What matters is having a plan that is realistic, that you can commit to, and that will help you deliver whatever it is you’re working towards.

Have fun putting your plan together, and in the next post we will take a look at the plan to identify key milestones you can aim for along the way.

Estimate the effort required to complete each task

If you’ve followed the posts so far you are well on the way to creating your project plan. You have a list of tasks needed to deliver the outcomes of your project. You put your tasks into logical groupings. Then you arranged your tasks in a logical order to show which tasks must be completed before others can begin.

Now you need to estimate how long each of those tasks will take. At this stage it is only an estimate – you can’t know for sure how long something will take unless you can foresee the future. You won’t know, for example, what problems might slow you down, or what you will have to do to fix these problems. Estimation can also be difficult if you are doing work that you have not done before, so you have no experience to base your estimate on. Estimation can also be difficult if you are doing creative work, such as design – who knows how long it will take to create a design that you or your client is comfortable with? You might also need to know who is going to do the work – someone with experience will work faster, and make less errors, than someone without experience.

In short, estimation is fraught with difficulties. No wonder then that this can cause problems with projects. Under-estimates can mean the project team is working against difficult or impossible targets. It can mean that your project is under-funded – for example if you asked for costs to cover 100 days, but should have asked for 200 days. Impossible timeframes and lack of funds will cause stress both for you and your team.

So, what can you do to improve your estimating?

For now, while we work through the first version of your first project plan I suggest you keep it simple.

Think about your first task, and work out how long you think it would take you. You need to consider how much time you are devoting to your project. Let’s say you are building a fence. If you think this would take you five days to build, but you can only do this at weekends, then it is going to take you two and a half weekends. That’s three weeks – not one.

Use your experience. If you have built fences before you will have a better understanding of the effort and problems involved. Compare the fence you are building now to the fences you have built before. What is the same, what is different? What does that mean for your estimate?

Use the work breakdown structure to visualise each task. A ‘dry run’ of your project may help you to estimate. How long will it take to dig post holes? How long will it take to procure and transport the timber? How long will it take to set the posts?

When will you be finished? This is about being clear on the scope of your project. Are you finished when the fence is built? Or when it is painted or treated? Or when you have painted a second coat? If you are not completely clear on scope your estimate will be way out – and it could be that your project expenses are way out too. If you underestimate cost, you can lose profit.

Now, you have ordered and grouped tasks, and you have estimates. All you need to do now is build your plan.

Arrange your tasks in order

So by now you should have an idea of all the things your project is going to deliver. You should also have a list of the tasks you need to complete to deliver these things. You have also put your tasks into natural groupings. The next basic project management step is to think about the order these tasks will be completed in.

Knowing the order will help to translate your list of tasks from a “To Do” list to a plan. Knowing the order means you know which tasks you will complete first. And then when you have finished that task, which task comes next, and so on. The plan guides you through each task, one by one, until you reach the end of the project. Having this ordered plan makes you efficient. When you have time for your project you don’t need to wonder “What next?” – the plan will tell you this.

So what things might you consider when you put your tasks in order?
Some tasks simply cannot be completed before others are completed. For example, you can’t build the walls on your new house, until you have completed the foundations. You can’t tile until you have prepared the wall. You’ can’t knit a sweater until you have bought the wool.

There may be some tasks that need to be done early because there is a long lead time. If your tiles need to be shipped in from overseas you might complete the task of ordering them early, so they are delivered by the time you are ready to tile.
It may be that you only have the resources to do a task at a particular time. For example, you can borrow your friends van to help you pick up building materials, but it is available one weekend only.

Consider also that not all tasks need to be ordered sequentially, one after the other. You may start some tasks at the same time as others, especially when you have a team of people who can all work on different tasks. You don’t need to wait for your small business to start up before you start working on your business plan.

Ordering your tasks is about putting them in a logical sequence, but also, as you can see from the examples, you may start to think about scheduling them against a calendar. The next step of basic project planning which will really help you to schedule your plan is to estimate the effort required to complete each task.

Group similar tasks together

I recommended in an earlier post that the first thing you need to do when planning a project is to list every task.  What are all the things your project will create and what are the things you need to do to create them?

This list is a great start, and it helps to keep it simple at this stage and just let your mind roam freely over what might need to be done.  When you have this list your next step will be to start making it into a plan.

Firstly, group together things which are similar.  Things you are going to make or do which fit together naturally.  For example, if your project was to renovate a room in your house you might group together all those things you need to do before you get started: maybe you need to buy tools, paint, or other materials.  You might group together all the things you need to do to prepare the room: clearing out furniture, stripping wallpaper, sanding woodwork.  You might then group together all the things you need to do for the renovation itself: painting, repairing.

Let's look at another example of grouping tasks.  If you were setting up a new business you might group together all those things you need to do before you get started: agreeing a company structure, finding an accountant, market research, building a pricing model.  All of those things would help you to put together a business plan.  So, your first group of tasks is based on creating the business plan.  Another group of tasks might be all the things you need to do from the moment you create your business: setting up shop, marketing, manufacturing.  Another group might be all the things you need to do to market your business: buiding a web-site, advertising, networking.

With each of these examples the groups of tasks all aim towards delivering something to your project.  It might be an empty room ready for painting, or it might be a marketing plan put in place.

Groups of tasks like these are often used in project management to provide a target to aim for, or a 'milestone'.  Completing all the tasks in a group, which often means actually delivering something, can provide a great sense of achievement.  That's another great reason to put some thought into your groups.  Try to design groups of work that not only fit together naturally, but allow you to complete something early in your project.

Of course you can have groups within groups.  In our new business example above there is a group of tasks for marketing which are part of the group of tasks for kicking off the business.  This is also a way of making it easier for yourself to get early wins.

So far we have listed the tasks we need to complete for our project, and we have grouped tasks into natural bundles that will often deliver something to our project.  The next step of building up our work breakdown structure, or project plan, is to think about the order in which we complete each of the tasks.

Keep it Simple

Project management (PM) can be a huge, complex, but powerful tool. You can plan and manage massive projects like building a bridge, or a rail line, or sending a satellite into orbit. To run this level of project you would need to plan, schedule, cost and re-plan until your plan was perfect. If you are sending someone into space, or building a rail line, don’t rely on this blog!

This blog is about basic project management. It is about using the fundamental, basic techniques of PM to help get you achieve your personal projects more efficiently. It is about delivering your work projects efficiently too, especially when you want to see results quickly. You can keep avoid over-engineering your work but still use project management techniques to help you deliver.

Let’s use an example. You have been asked, let’s say, to facilitate a small training course at your workplace. It may not make sense to build a complex project plan for this, but it would make sense to at least think of all the things you need to deliver this project, and all the tasks you need to complete. You might need to invite a speaker, book a room, arrange catering, arrange IT resources or stationery, send invites, print materials…You can use a work breakdown structure to help you quickly determine everything you need, what you need to do to deliver these, and to work on your priorities.

You do not need to agonise over the plan, or make it complex. You can keep it simple. The ability to ‘keep it simple’ is one of the ‘soft’ skills I recommend in Project Life for anyone managing a project. If you can simplify things, instead of adding complexity, you will make things easier for yourself, your team, and your stakeholders – the people you are managing the project for.

List every task

You can’t get more basic in basic project management than defining your work breakdown structure. It’s a fundamental part of planning your project. But before we look at what it can do for you, let’s pull that bit of jargon apart and say what it is: it's a list of all the things you need to do to complete your project.

That’s all it is. A “To do” list.

Put into your list everything you think you need to do.  The list might include tasks which help prepare for your project, such as buying materials or planning.  It should include all the tasks you need to do complete your project, maybe building, writing, creating.  Your list should also contain all the things you need to do to finish your project.

When you start making this list don't worry too much about formatting it, or ordering it.  There is more you can do later to turn your list into a plan.  For now just list every task that comes to mind. Later we will think about grouping similar tasks together and putting our tasks in order

The following is an extract from Project Life which explains the benefits to you of building your work breakdown structure when planning a project:

My first step in building the plan is to identify smaller jobs that make up the whole project. I literally break down the work into component tasks. Why do we go to the trouble of breaking down the project into these component tasks? Why not just say “Renovate bathroom”? I know roughly what the tasks are, so why write them down separately?

Because seeing each task as a separate item forces me to think about each step I need to take. I can take each of those steps in my mind and think about the problems I might encounter. Thinking through each step in detail allows me to foresee and prepare for work, which otherwise I am simply going to stumble into, perhaps unprepared and without the right tools. I can see steps that I might miss out or not consider properly if I thought only at project level. I can think through things that might go wrong, or might be difficult for me. If I am able to spot these risks, then I can also think about adding other tasks that help me to deal with those risks.

Having broken down the project into these component tasks, and thought about the problems that might arise, I can estimate more accurately how long each step might take. Estimating how long each step takes, and adding up each of these estimates, is going to be much more accurate than estimating at project level. My estimate for ‘renovate bathroom’ can be little more than a guess, but my estimate for “paint ceiling” has some chance of being more realistic.

Seeing each step separately also allows me to put the steps into a logical sequence. It allows me to spot dependencies between tasks. I know that before I can put in new tiles I need to remove the old tiles.

I can also group related tasks together. For example, there are a number of things I need to buy up front. There are a number of things I need to do to prepare the bathroom before tiling. This grouping gives me a sense of the main sets of tasks within the project, and also helps me to think through if I have included all such tasks.

Having the project split into smaller steps also allows me to think about who can do the work. Perhaps I can give some tasks to other people, and ask them to do the work. I will get a plumber to do some of the key tasks, for which I do not have the right skills or experience.

Formulating a plan with step after organised step allows me to get an accurate picture of what I need to do to get to the end of the project. It gives me a ‘rich’ picture, saturated with detail, which gives me the ability to visualise more clearly what is involved in getting to the end of the project: to having a renovated bathroom.

Finally, when I start work, the plan helps me to focus on one task at a time, not the whole project. I can see that to get to the end of the project I need to finish step one first, then move onto step two, then step three. Without this rich picture I might not work as logically or efficiently.