How to plan a project plan

How to create simple, powerful project plans

Good project plans are more than a list of what to do when

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What is a project plan? A project plan is the outcome of the project planning process, where a project manager decides, prioritizes, and assigns the tasks and resources necessary to complete a project. Project plans will name the members of a team, what tools and materials are needed, and what steps must be taken to achieve success.

When most people hear “project plan,” they picture some kind of schedule – a laundry list of what to do when. But that’s only a teeny part of it.

A good project manager develops a plan that covers everything from the problem you’re trying to solve to the project scope, deliverables, risks, and dependencies, then maps out a path to complete the project successfully.

Without a project plan, team members don’t have a high-level view of how and when everything will get done. They get lost in the forest of issues and needs and often don’t know where to start. Or worse: they charge ahead with what they imagine to be their contribution, without fully understanding how (or when) their work fits in.

Creating a project plan step-by-step

It seems a bit meta to go through a step-by-step process in order to create a plan, which is itself a step-by-step process. But it’s the key to creating a robust and successful plan.

Before you start drawing up a plan, consider everything you know about your team, your organization, your resources and what you’re trying to do. It’s important to build a shared understanding with your team as soon as planning starts.

Step 1: Think of the plan as your project’s map

As you draw the map, it helps to ask yourself:

Step 2: Get to know your stakeholders

Get a read on the messy facts of organizational politics, difficult personalities, and possible points of debate that may impact the project management process. Larry W. Smith, PMP, Project Manager at the Software Technology Support Center, stresses the importance of performing a stakeholder analysis. According to Smith, everyone involved wants the project to succeed, but forgetting to meet the needs of just one influential stakeholder could ruin things for everyone.

Smith recommends taking time to:

The communication piece can’t be over-stated. Bernie Ferguson, a project leadership whiz here at Atlassian, starts communicating with stakeholders even in the earliest stages of a project. He says, “We use the Project Poster technique to build a shared understanding amongst team members and stakeholders. What are we doing? What’s the value to customers and to the business? Why do we think this is the right solution? We get feedback on the answers to all these questions before anything hits the team’s roadmap.”

Step 3: Take off your rose-colored glasses and map out a timeline

One of the most common mistakes that project managers make while planning is that they’re overly optimistic. Rather than assuming the best possible situation, take some time to consider problems that might arise and how they could impact your project management timeline. Make sure you perform basic due diligence. Hold a “pre-mortem” workshop, or conduct a series of one-on-one meetings with key players and stakeholders.

You can sketch out a timeline by asking other project managers how long similar projects took to plan. You can meet with teams you know you’ll be working with to understand how long certain tasks will take. If you have a project management tool, check the archives for old project schedules.

Then communicate, communicate, communicate. Let all concerned parties know the details. Because hey: wouldn’t you want to know? Simplified Gantt charts are a common and effective way of visualizing the timeline so it’s easy for everyone to understand.

Step 4: Recruit a few friends

As the project manager, it’s up to you to deliver the project plan (and, ultimately, the project). But this isn’t about you going off into a cubicle and writing the thing. As you develop the project plan, it’s absolutely critical that you keep all of the key stakeholders involved. Stay in near-constant contact. You’ll find they’re excellent resources.

By listening to what your team has to say, and by chewing on ideas together, you can arrive at smart conclusions in a timely manner. That type of collaboration builds a better plan and rallies support for the project overall.

At Atlassian, we use templates to reduce the overhead associated with the planning process and trigger the types of discussions essential to project-planning best practices. Project plan templates are an excellent way to get people to think about aspects of project management that they may not have considered before.

Afterall, it’s one thing to have a good elevator pitch for your project, but creating a robust plan is a lot different. Using a template prompts you to think deeply about what you’re going to do and ensures you haven’t forgotten anything. And let’s face it: thinking through dependencies and risks is no fun, so unless there’s some kind of forcing function, it’s all too easy to gloss over those bits in your plan.

Tip: Our project plan template is free and available for anyone to use. We won’t even ask for your email. Grab the PDF here.

Step 5: Think through goals and scope

Create a problem statement that puts down, in concrete terms, exactly what you’re trying to solve. Then develop a hypothesis that states what you think should happen as a result of your project. Next, sketch out an explanation of the background on the project and any data or insights that support it. And determine the metrics you will use to measure success – these will probably inform several areas of your plan.

Ask yourself and your team members what you must have vs. what’s nice to have or simply not needed. By agreeing on the scope of the project at an early stage – including what’s not in scope – you reduce the chance of miscommunication among the stakeholders. You know how much time to ask for from the other people who are helping with the project. And you’ll be able to recognize changes in scope easily.

Scope creep is real. The key is balancing scope, timeline, and resources so none of them get out of control.

Step 6: Anticipate (and prevent) surprises

All project plans include facts on budget, schedule, and scope. But a good plan also answers essential questions about your project, including:

Your plan needn’t go into elaborate detail on each of these issues, but it should provide enough information to enable you to implement the project smoothly, without a lot of surprises.

Tip: Use the DACI method for making sound decisions about your project in a timely manner.

Step 7: Choose your favorite project management flavor

As the project manager, you can choose a waterfall or agile approach to project management. An agile approach delivers results fast with small, iterative tasks and a process that continuously evaluates requirements, plans, and results. In this method, time and resources are considered to be fixed. If something needs to give, the project’s scope is reduced to just the must-have pieces – at least for that iteration. Further iterations can be added later to round it out with the nice-to-haves.

A waterfall approach is a more-traditional, sequential (waterfall-like), linear process that moves the project along stage by stage, team by team. Here, scope is considered to be fixed, while timing and resources flex.

Step 8: Write and review your plan

Once you’ve answered all the questions, held all the discussions, and filled up a warehouse of sticky notes, it’s time to write your project plan. Whether it’s in the words you choose or the formatting and design, keep it simple.

Here are some helpful details that should be part of any plan, no matter the format:

When your project plan is finished, there’s always a moment of triumph when you dance around your workplace high-fiving everyone in sight. But before you do that, take a moment. Ask someone who hasn’t been involved in the writing to look it over.

Tip: When estimating each task’s size, resist the temptation to go deep into the weeds. Remember these are educated guesses – not blood-oaths.

Step 9: Share your plan… then brace yourself 😉

Your project plan is finished and proofread. Time to get it out there to the people who will be working with you on the project as well as the stakeholders who need to be informed. Then get ready for the real fun, starting with a project kick-off that actually moves things forward. Remember, there will be changes and challenges, you just have to be ready to manage them.

Whatever happens, keep in touch with your plan. By focusing on the intended scope and the agreed-upon steps, you’ll get your project delivered.

How To Write An Effective Project Plan In 6 Simple Steps

Projects are a complicated business; there’s a lot of logistics, elements, and moving parts involved in the process. So, if you want your project to move forward successfully, you need to set yourself up for that success—and that means writing a project plan.

But how, exactly, do you do that? Let’s take a look at the ins and outs of writing a project plan—all in six simple steps:

Why Are Project Plans Important?

First things first. Before jumping into how to write a project plan, it’s helpful to discover why project plans are so important to begin with.

The main reason project plans are an absolute must is that they allow you to visualize your entire project, from beginning to end—and develop a clear strategy to get from point A to point B.

“Project plans help us strategize a path to project success, allowing us to consider the factors that will impact our project, from stakeholders to budget to schedule delays, and plan how to maximize or mitigate these factors,” says Yazdani.

Project plans also help to get everyone involved on the same page, setting clear expectations around what needs to be accomplished, when, and by who. “Project plans create a framework for measuring project progress and success,” says Yazdani. “Project plans set clear expectations for. stakeholders by outlining exactly what. will [be accomplished] and when it will be delivered.”

“Project plans provide. teams with purpose and direction,” says Yazdani. “Transparent project plans show team members how their individual tasks and responsibilities contribute to the overall success of the project, encouraging engagement and collaboration.”

How To Write A Project Plan

Clearly, project plans are a must-have element for any successful project. But what are the steps to writing one?

1. Establish Project Scope And Metrics

The first step to writing a project plan is defining what, exactly, your project is—including the project’s purpose, parameters, and goals. “Clearly define your project’s scope or overall purpose,” says Yazdani. “Confirm any project parameters or constraints, like budget, resource availability, and timeline,” says Yazdani.

Taking the time to define your project scope is important; it will help to ensure that the rest of your project plan moves your project in the direction you want it to go. But just as important as defining your project scope and purpose is defining what metrics you’re going to use to make sure you’re on track as the project progresses.

“Establish how you will measure success,” says Yazdani. “Are there metrics, performance criteria, or quality standards you need to meet?”

Clearly defining what your project is, the project’s overall purpose, and how you’re going to measure success lays the foundation for the rest of your project plan—so make sure you take the time to define each of these elements from the get-go.

2. Identify Key Stakeholders

Once you’ve defined your project scope, purpose, and metrics, it’s time to get clear on who you need to bring the project to life—or, in other words, identify the key stakeholders of the project.

“List individuals or groups who will be impacted by the project,” says Yazdani.

In addition to identifying who needs to be involved in the project, you’ll also want to think about how they’ll need to be involved—and at what level. For example, let’s say you’re managing a cross-functional project to launch a new marketing campaign that includes team members from your marketing, design, and sales departments.

When identifying your key stakeholders, you might create different lists based on responsibility or level of involvement with the project—for example, decision-makers (who will need to provide input at each step of the project), managers (who will be overseeing employees within their department), and creative talent (who will be actually creating the deliverables for the campaign), from each department.

Getting clear on who needs to be involved in the project—and how they’re going to be involved—will help guide the rest of the project plan writing process (particularly when it comes to creating and assigning tasks).

3. Outline Deliverables

As mentioned, defining your project’s purpose is the first step in writing a project plan. But defining a project’s purpose is more conceptual; in order to make sure your project fulfills its purpose (and that you achieve what you set out to achieve), you have to take things a step further—and move from the conceptual to the tangible.

Or, in other words, you need to outline all your project’s deliverables—the real, tangible outcomes that your project needs to produce in order to be considered a success.

“What will you create, build, design, produce, accomplish or deliver?,” says Yazdani. “Clearly outline your project’s concrete and tangible deliverables or outcomes.”

Defining the concrete items you need your project to deliver will help you reverse-engineer the things that need to happen to bring those items to life—which is a must before moving onto the next step.

4. Develop Tasks

Once you’ve clearly defined your project deliverables, you can drill down those deliverables into actionable tasks—tasks you can then assign to your team.

“Let your deliverables guide the work of the project,” says Yazdani. “Break down each deliverable into smaller and smaller components until you get to an actionable task.”

Once you’ve broken down all of your deliverables into manageable, assignable tasks, it’s also important to pay attention to how each of those tasks interact with each other; that way, you can plan, assign, and add deadlines accordingly.

“Highlight any dependencies between tasks, such as tasks that can’t be started until another task is complete,” says Yazdani. “List any resources you will need to accomplish these tasks.”

5. Assign Tasks And Deadlines

Once you’ve written out all of your tasks, it’s time to assign those tasks out to your team—along with deadlines as to when each task needs to be completed.

While you want to make sure your project moves forward at a steady pace, you also want to make sure your tasks and deadlines are keeping your teams motivated and engaged. So, when writing your project plan, make sure to “set realistic and achievable deadlines for completing tasks and deliverables,” says Yazdani. “Highlight dates that are inflexible and factor in task dependencies. Add in milestones or checkpoints to monitor progress and celebrate successes.”

Once you map out all of your tasks and deadlines, you should have a clear picture of how and when your project is going to come together—and the initial writing process is just about finished.

But that doesn’t mean your project plan is complete! There’s one more key step to the process.

6. Share, Gather Feedback, And Adjust The Project Plan As Necessary

While steps 1 through 5 may make up your initial writing process, if you want your project plan to be as strong and complete as it can be, it’s important to share it with your team—and get their input on how they think it can be improved.

“Share the plan with your project team and key stakeholders, gathering feedback to make adjustments and improvements,” says Yazdani.

After you gather your team’s feedback —and make any necessary adjustments based on that feedback—you can consider your project plan written (hurray!).

But as your project progresses, things may change or evolve—so it’s important to stay flexible and make changes and adjustments as needed.

“Expect to update your plan as you gather more information, encounter changing requirements and delays, and learn from feedback and mistakes,” says Yazdani. “By using your project plan to guide your activities and measure progress, you’ll be able to refine and improve your plan as you move through the project, tweaking tasks and deadlines as deliverables are developed.”

Tips For Writing Effective Project Plans

Need some more inspiration? Here are a few tips to ensure that your project plans are as strong and effective as they can possibly be:

Use Other Project Plans For Inspiration

Writing a project plan takes time and effort. But there’s no need to reinvent the wheel for every new project! Instead, look to other successful project plans for inspiration—and use those as a guide when writing the plan for your project.

“Review templates and plans for similar projects, or for other projects within your organization or industry, to get ideas for structuring and drafting your own plan,” says Yazdani.

Get Your Team Involved In The Process

You may be in charge of spearheading the project. But that doesn’t mean that you have to—or even that you should—write the project plan alone.

“Collaborate with your project team and key stakeholders on crafting a project plan,” says Yazdani. “Input into the project plan supports buy-in to project goals and encourages continued engagement throughout the project.”

Don’t Let The Perfect Be The Enemy Of The Good

You may be tempted to write (and rewrite) your project plan until you’ve got every detail mapped out perfectly. But spending too much time trying to get everything “perfect” can actually hold up the project. So don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good—and instead of getting caught up in getting everything perfect from the get-go, stay willing and flexible to adjust your project plan as you move forward.

“Focus on outcomes, not plan perfection,” says Yazdani. “While it would be awesome for the first draft of our plan to require no changes while also inspiring our team and ensuring project success, our goal shouldn’t be a perfect plan. Our goal is a plan that allows us to successfully deliver on project goals. Responsiveness to changing needs and a shifting environment is more important than plan perfection.”

Follow These Steps For Project Plan Success

Writing a project plan, especially if you’re new to the process, can feel overwhelming. But now that you know the exact steps to write one, you have everything you need to create a strong, cohesive plan from the ground up—and watch your project thrive as a result.

Good or bad, we’d love to hear your thoughts. Find us on Twitter ( @trello )!

Write A Project Plan That You’re Proud Of (+ Project Plan Examples)

The world has changed. Why hasn’t work? Transform your work with Smartsheet.

You want to know how to make a project plan that’s useful and realistic—and in this post, I provide the background, examples, checklist, and step-by-step instructions to help you do exactly that.

What we’ll cover in this project plan guide:

By the end of this post, you’ll know how to write a project plan, what to include, and how to make it as useful as possible in your projects.

What Is A Project Plan?

A project plan is a document, often presented as a Gantt chart, that shows each step to take a project from A to B. It serves as a roadmap that shows the project phases, key project activities and their start and end dates, dependencies between project tasks, and project milestones.

Project plans can be as simple as a scribble on the back of a napkin or a few lines in Excel, but it’s usually presented as a Gantt chart, made in Microsoft Project or a similar alternative planning tool.

What Should A Project Plan Include?

Here’s what a project plan typically includes:

Why Project Planning Still Matters

Once the pride of project managers everywhere, the humble project plan has got itself a bit of a bad reputation. If you’re asking yourself,

The answer is still yes.

After all, clients still want answers for questions like,

If you opt for the No Project Plan Alternative, it’s difficult to answer these seemingly basic project management questions. The reality is that clients need to know what they’re getting, when, and for how much before signing off. And it’s not just for clients—as a project manager, you’ll need that project plan to ascertain if the project is on track. You can’t know unless you’ve got something to measure against.

Even so, there are still plenty of people who’d say, “But aren’t project plans for complex IT projects just a waste of time?” They argue that project plans don’t reflect the reality of the tasks at hand, that they artificially constrain your teams from self-optimizing, and that they’re perpetually out of date due to constant changes.

These arguments do bring up an important point about project plans. Fast-paced industries with complex projects (such as digital and IT) are demanding a new approach to project planning. Instead of a static document, our project plans need to come to life—the best project plans today are ones that are accessible, readily understandable for a wide variety of users, and highly adaptable.

When done well, project plans bring many benefits to your projects. Find below 7 reasons why you shouldn’t give up on project plans just yet.

7 Reasons Why A Project Plan Matters

Here are seven reasons why project plans are probably the single most important piece of project documentation.

Before You Start Your Project Plan

Before you dive in, remember these important points about project plans:

The 5 Big Project Plan Brief Questions

Before you get started on creating the project plan, you need to understand the project’s brief—what you’re trying to achieve. Without understanding the project goal, there’s no way to deliver on it. At a minimum, you need to be clear on:

Where do you get this information? Usually, a good project kickoff meeting will help us produce a proper project brief. If you don’t ultimately understand why you’re doing a project, you can end up barking up the wrong tree. You might not focus the resources on our project as well as you could. You might include in the process activities that are redundant, or you might produce some outputs which aren’t useful.

Once you’re clear on the Why, What, When, How, and Who of a project, you can start putting together your project plan. Let’s start with a simple example of a project plan below.

Simple Project Plan Example: Making A Cake

Below is a simple project plan showing four phases of a rather laborious project we’ve concocted to make a cake. The project plan shows the process to get from our current state (no cake) to our desired future state (eating cake). It shows us how long the process will take, and the order of the steps to follow to produce the cake properly.

Simple project plan example using Microsoft Project – A Project plan to make a cake

The project plan shows:

Sadly, this project shows that no resources have been assigned against any of the tasks so we’ve still got no one to actually make the cake; we’ll need to find someone to do that! Finally, at the top of the image, you can see Microsoft Project also gives us a timeline overview so you can see a 50,000ft view summarising the project, the phases, milestones, and progress.

Here are a couple of other project planning software similar to this one that can help you create a project schedule:

How to Create a Project Plan in 5 Simple Steps

Every project tells a story about its goals, team, timing, and deliverables—and it requires detailed project planning and management to get the story right. Some of those stories are short and to the point while others are epic novels rife with twists and turns.

No matter the length or level of drama, every story is based on a story arc or an outline—or as we call it in the project management world, a project plan.

Project planning definitions

Before we dive into the process basics, let’s start with a couple of definitions.В

What is project planning?

Project planning is the process of defining the project scope, objectives, and steps needed to get the work done. It’s one of the most important processes in project management. The output of the project planning process is a project management plan.

What is a project management plan?

A project management plan—also known as a project plan—is a document that outlines the process your team will use to manage the project according to scope to meet its stated objectives. The purpose of a project plan is to map out the steps and resources it will take to complete a project on time and budget.

A project plan communicates vital information—such as deadlines, assignments, and key milestones—to all project stakeholders and is integral to project success. It is most commonly represented in the form of a gantt chart to make it easy to ensure work stays on track.

The easiest way to build a project plan

You can build a beautiful project plan in just 10 minutes. Best of all, you can easily switch between gantt, calendar, and list views in a single click.

Project planning steps: How to write a good project plan

Poor planning can lead to some pretty ugly consequences—from missed deadlines and budget overages to team burnout and client frustration. That’s why it’s important to establish a solid process you can use to plan any project.В

Planning a project doesn’t have to be difficult. These basic project planning steps can help you write a plan that’s both realistic and on target.

Rather watch than read? Check out our video tutorial on how to make a realistic project plan.

Step 1: Start with research and preplanning

A project plan is more than a dry document with dates. It’s the story of your project, and you don’t want it to be a tall tale! So make sure you know all the facts before you start creating a project plan.

Understand the project scope and value

Understanding the ins and outs of the project will help you determine the best process and identify any snags that might get in the way of success. Conduct your own research to dig deeper on:

Dive into any communications that are relevant to the project. Review the scope of work and related documents (maybe an RFP or notes from sales calls or meetings with your client team). Be thorough in your research to uncover critical project details, and ask thoughtful questions before you commit to anything.В

Interview key stakeholders

If you want to dazzle stakeholders with a stellar project delivery, you’ve got to know how they work and what they expect. Schedule time with your main project contact, and ask them some tough questions about process, organizational politics, and general risks before creating a project plan.В

This will give project stakeholders confidence that your team has the experience to handle any difficult personality or situation. It also shows you care about the success of the project from the start.

Be sure to discuss these things with your stakeholders:

Get to know your team

The last step in the research phase is to take time to learn more about the people who’ll be responsible for the work. Sit down with your team and get to know their:

Understanding these basics about your team will help you craft a thoughtful plan that takes their work styles and bandwidth into consideration. After all, a happy team delivers better projects.

Step 2: Draft a rough outline of your project plan

Now that you’ve gathered the basic project details, the next step is to knock out a rough draft of your plan. Take some time to think about the discussions you had in the pre-planning phase and the approach your team might take to meet the project goals.

Sketch out the main components of your project plan

Sit down with a pen and paper (or a whiteboard), and outline how the project should work at a high level. Be sure you have a calendar close by to check dates.

If you’re at a loss for where to begin, start with the who, what, when, and how of the project. Any solid project plan should answer these questions:

A first outline can be very rough and might look something like a work breakdown structure, as noted in our chapter on project estimation. Make sure your project plan outline includes the following components:

Considering these elements will help you avoid surprises—or at least minimize them. And remember, you’re doing this as a draft so you can use it as a conversation-starter for your team. It’s not final yet!

Get input from your team on process, effort, and timing

You don’t want to put yourself or your team in an awkward position by not coming to a consensus on the approach before presenting it to your client. That’s why a project manager can’t be the only one writing a project plan.

Once you’ve sketched out a basic outline of your plan, take those rough ideas and considerations to your team. This enables you to invite discussion about what might work rather than simply dictating a process. After all, every project must begin with clear communication of the project goals and the effort required to meet them.В

Be sure to get input from your team on how they can complete the tasks at hand without killing the budget and the team’s morale. As a project manager, you can decide on Agile vs. Waterfall approaches, but when it comes down to it, you need to know that the team can realistically execute the plan.

You can also use this project plan review time to question your own thinking and push the team to take a new approach to the work. For example, if you’re working on a website design project plan, could designers start creating visual concepts while the wireframes are being developed? Or can you have two resources working on the same task at once?

Running ideas by the team and having an open dialogue about the approach not only helps you build a more accurate project plan. It gets everyone thinking about the project in the same terms. This type of buy-in and communication builds trust and gets people excited about working together to solve a goal. It can work wonders for the greater good of your team and project.

Step 3: Build out your detailed project schedule

You should feel comfortable enough at this point to put together a rock-solid project schedule using whatever tool works for you. (Ahem, TeamGantt works nicely for a lot of happy customers.)

Build your project plan

Any good online project planning tool will help you formalize your thoughts and lay them out in a consistent, visual format that’s easy to follow and track. Make sure tasks, durations, milestones, and dates are crystal-clear, and try to keep your project plan simple. The easier it is to read, the better!

Be as flexible as possible when it comes to how your project plan is presented. There’s no absolute when it comes to how to format your project plan as long as you and your team understand what goes into one.

Remember, people absorb information differently. While you might be partial to a gantt chart, others might prefer to view tasks in a list, calendar, or even a kanban board. You can make all of those variations work if you’ve taken the steps to create a solid plan.

TeamGantt gives you the ability to quickly and easily build and adjust a project plan using a simple drag and drop feature. Plus, it comes with customizable views to fit every team member’s work style. Try it out, and create a project plan for free!

If your team currently prefers spreadsheets and isn’t quite ready to use TeamGantt yet, try our free Excel gantt chart template.

The easiest way to build a project plan

You can build a beautiful project plan in just 10 minutes. Best of all, you can easily switch between gantt, calendar, and list views in a single click.

Step 4: Present and confirm your plan

You’re almost finished! You’ve done your research, outlined your approach, discussed it with your team, and built your formal project plan.

Now it’s time to do your due diligence. It’s easy to throw stuff in a plan, but you have to make sure you get it right.В

Run your final plan by your internal team

Your team needs to know the reality of your plan as it stands after you’ve built it out in TeamGantt. And you want to be sure they’re comfortable committing to the details. If they don’t, things will quickly fall apart!

Always review your final plan with your team before delivering it to stakeholders. Why? Because things like dates and tasks—and even assignments—will shift as you formalize the rough sketch of your plan.В

Here are a few things you’ll want to discuss with your team as you review the final plan together:

There’s nothing more embarrassing than delivering a plan with an error or a promise you can’t keep. Taking a few minutes to get buy-in from your team will give everyone peace of mind about your plan.

Review your project plan with stakeholders

Once you’ve confirmed the plan with your team and have their full sign-off, you’re ready to share your project plan with stakeholders.В

When delivering your project plan, make sure you provide an executive summary. This might come in the form of a project brief or project charter. A short recap of the overall methodology, resources, assumptions, deadlines, and related review times will help you convey what the plan means to the project and everyone involved.

Project plans can be daunting, so schedule time to present your project plan to your stakeholders at a high level. Here are some things you’ll want to point out about your plan during this review:

If a stakeholder is interested in the day-to-day details, feel free to walk them through the plan line by line. Otherwise, start by explaining overall sections or phases, and be sure to come back to your plan at intervals throughout the project to remind them of tasks, next steps, and overall progress.

Step 5: Execute your plan and adjust as needed

Some projects are smooth and easy to manage, and others are a complete nightmare that wake you up at 3 a.m. every other night. Thankfully, having a solid project plan is your best defense against project chaos once work gets underway.

Work your plan

Keep in mind that project plans are living documents. Projects change constantly, and someone has to stay on top of—and document—that change. Remember to:

How to create a project plan in TeamGantt

Ready to plan your project in TeamGantt? Follow these easy steps to build a plan that’s structured well and includes the elements you need for project success.

1. Enter your basic project details.

To create a new project plan in TeamGantt, click the New Project button in the upper right corner of the My Projects screen. Then enter your project name and start date, and select the days of the week you want to include in your plan. Click Create New Project to move on to the next step.

2. List out your project tasks and milestones.

Now the real planning fun begins! Enter all the different tasks it will take to get the job done. If there are any key meetings, deliverable deadlines, or approvals, add those as milestones in your project plan.

3. Organize tasks into subgroups.В

Scrolling through one long list of tasks can be mind-numbing, even to the best of us. Break tasks down into phases or sections to ensure your project plan is easy to read and understand.В

4. Add task durations and milestone dates to the project timeline.

A visual project plan makes it easy to see exactly what needs to get done by when. Make sure every task has a start and end date so nothing falls through the cracks. TeamGantt’s drag and drop feature makes this planning step quick and easy.

5. Connect related tasks with dependencies.

Adding dependencies between tasks ensures work gets done in the right order and also helps you plan for delay risks. If your plan shifts and you need to move tasks around, dependencies speed up the process.

6. Assign responsible team members to tasks.

That way there’s no confusion about who’s doing what, and your team can update and manage their daily tasks. Don’t forget to check team availability along the way to avoid overloading anyone with too much work.

7. Use the RACI chart to define task roles more clearly.

This feature takes accountability one step further by letting you assign more specific roles to each task: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. Learn how RACI charts work and what each role means.

8. Add hourly estimates and/or points to each task.В

This makes it easy to see the lift each task involves at a glance. Including hourly estimates in your project plan also enables you to manage workloads and track overages more accurately.

9. Color-code tasks for better scannability.

You can use colors to categorize tasks by project phase, priority, department, or team member—whatever makes visual sense to you and your team.

10. Add notes to clarify tasks or spell out important details.

There’s no such thing as too much information if it means your team has what they need to deliver quality work on time. Use the Notes section of your Discussion tab to enter any pertinent details your team will find helpful.

11. Upload important documents to the project.

This ensures project files are accessible to everyone in a centralized hub. You might attach your scope document, project requirements, risk assessment matrix, or even a creative brief to guide your team to successful completion.

Simple project plan examples

If you’re planning a project for the first time or taking on a totally new type of project, you might be struggling to get your plan off the ground. So let’s take a look at a couple of project management plan examples you can use to generate ideas for your own planning.В В

Example project plan for building a house

Building a house requires coordination of crews and materials on top of tasks and timelines. That’s why planning is especially critical in construction project management.В

The video below walks you through an example of a project management plan using our free construction schedule template. It’s a simple place to start if you’re building a house and need to make a project plan quickly.

Agile project plan example

You might think gantt charts and Agile projects don’t mix. But a hybrid approach enables you to plan and track Agile sprints on a traditional timeline, while maintaining a flexible workflow.В

In this sample Agile project plan, we built each sprint out as its own task group, with milestones for sprint planning and deployment.

The bonus? Your team can use kanban boards in TeamGantt to manage their daily workflow.

Free project planning templates

Want to save time creating your next project plan? We created a whole library of project templates you can use to jumpstart your planning process!

Check out these free project plan templates:

Plan your next project in minutes

Discover just how easy project planning can be with TeamGantt. Create your first gantt chart for free!

How to Plan a Project? Try 2-Step Planning with Kanban

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Check out what’s happening around Kanbanize and what’s fresh.

I’ve been dealing with Kanban for the past 10 years. In the beginning, it was just my work passion, then it turned out to be my company and to some extent, my life.

There’s a bit of irony in this, however. Throughout this decade of learning and experimentation, I never found a project planning model that worked for me. You’d think that something so fundamental, such as planning, should be one of the first things to figure out but it wasn’t.

We’ve had some ideas for good planning, but they worked for specific contexts that allowed the team and the managers to control what and when should be done. For contexts where planning had to be agreed upon with the customer and where sensitivity towards time was generally higher, Kanban had no definitive answer. At least not one that’s easy to apply in practice, not just in theory.

Now, ten years later, I think we’ve figured it out. Finally!

Actually, none of the concepts involved in this new way of planning projects is new. We’ve seen it all. Yet, I do believe that the way we’re proposing to approach planning in Kanban is quite different from anything you’ve done before.

Let’s make one thing clear before we continue. This way of planning has been tested and proven to work in a knowledge work context. It may fail miserably if you’re attempting it in other contexts, so please use it at your own discretion.

Project Initiatives vs. Tasks

Before we dig into the details, let’s introduce a few terms.

Task – this is a work item represented by a Kanban card on a team board. This could be anything that the teams are working on (user story, content piece, design drawing, prototype, legal document, etc.)

Project Initiative – an initiative is a collection of tasks that have to be completed in order to achieve a certain goal or produce a deliverable. Think of initiatives as the building blocks of a project. I.e. a project consists of multiple initiatives.

The first substantial difference between the traditional project planning and the planning proposed in this article is the level at which you care about start and end dates. While in the traditional project planning managers plan on the task level, with the Kanban planning we plan on the Initiative level.

Let’s dig a bit further into this as it’s a very intuitive approach to our everyday life, but we rarely employ it in business. Imagine that you’re finishing work, and then you have to go to the grocery store, pick your child from ballet and go home to prepare dinner.

How would you plan for this, if you had to go into the details?

I bet it’s going to be something like this:

I’m yet to see somebody who plans the same set of activities like that:

… and so on, you get it, right?

If we dissect these two planning methods, the first one resembles planning on the initiatives level and the second one resembles planning on the individual task level. Despite the fact that the second approach is much less intuitive and, in fact, much less accurate, that’s what we typically see in project planning.

We are asked to estimate every single item and then overlay the items on a big, fat Gantt chart that’s supposed to show us when things are going to end. This rarely works well in a knowledge work contexts and here’s why.

Planning Initiatives Is Easier While Providing Almost the Same Value

The value of planning is to allow us to take decisions. First, we create a plan, so that we know if we should take the project or not. Then we plan in order to schedule the completion of work and be able to steer in one way or another.

Let’s say it’s 6:23 already and you’re just entering the store. Do you need to have a detailed plan in order to know that you’re getting late? No, you need a good-enough plan. Alternatively, if you’re on time, is it because of your detailed plan? Probably not. Chances are that you had a good-enough plan that allowed you to step on the gas or take it easy during the trip.

The point here is to put as little effort in planning all the details, unless absolutely necessary. We should operate on the initiative level and only go to the task level when there’s a deviation from the high-level plan. The high-level plan will bring some 80% of the value and you’d rarely need the other 20%.

Think of driving in a foreign country with your GPS on. If you’re going in the right direction you won’t bother to look into the GPS all the time. But if your gas is running out, you’ll dig into the detailed map and look for a gas station. However, for the most part, you don’t really care if you’re going through village X or village Y, right?

Planning Initiatives Is More Flexible

This one should be obvious. If you plan in great detail, then you have no option to change tasks on the spot, whenever it makes sense.

Imagine you planned to first buy cheese, then get the bread and then the vegetables. But what if the grocery store shifted the products around and now the vegetables are closer to the cheese than the bread? Would you still get the bread first and then go back to pick the vegetables? Of course not. So, why plan in such detail and risk to be wrong most of the time when you have a team of clever people who can think and take this type of decisions on the spot?

Planning Initiatives Lets Your People Take the Initiative

The role of the manager is to create capable teams and then provide them with the right goals. When the team is aware of the goals and has the necessary support (knowledge, tools, etc.), they will get the job done without the need of micro-instructions.

Self-organization is by far the most superior organization of knowledge work teams as it allows the people closest to the problems to actually solve them, which is the most effective and efficient way to deal with issues.

Even the fathers of Lean at Toyota say that they don’t want to use a lot of Poka Yoke measures, as they want the workers to think. If the factory workers at Toyota, who work primarily with their hands, are expected to think, then what about knowledge workers, who work with their heads?

The point is that a high-level plan allows you to harvest the true potential of your teams. Just do the goal setting and trust them to do the best job. You will certainly have the means to track progress, just bear with the article for a little longer.

How to Create a Project Plan that Actually Works?

Okay, this was quite some reading just to get to the juicy part. Sorry, but we had to introduce some of the core thinking in order to deal with the actual planning process.

2 Simple Project Planning Steps

You can apply this planning model to any sort of knowledge work, but let’s plan a project in order to illustrate the approach. Our project is going to be a very trivial thing – the new website of a company.

Step 1. Developing a Project Plan with Timelines

At Kanbanize, we believe in the timeline as a planning tool. High-level roadmaps are one of the most useful and wide-spread visualizations of what our future work is going to be. Some may think it’s just another representation of the Gantt chart, which is clearly not effective in Knowledge work contexts, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with timelines when used on the Initiatives level.

If you think about it, timelines are simply WIP-limited Gantt charts. If you are not familiar with this, Work in Progress (WIP) is a Kanban term that means how much started work we have at a particular moment in time. Actually, one of the most effective practices of Kanban is exactly limiting the WIP in a system and the timelines help us do it on the Initiatives level.

Now, back to our website project. Let’s create a high-level plan that describes the main deliverables that have to be worked on.

The plan suggests that we need to do a short discovery phase, then prepare a spec, finalize the front page design and do the actual work. Right now you might be thinking “Gosh, why the Waterfall planning for a website?” and I’m with you. This is indeed, a waterfall type of planning, which we all know doesn’t work for complex knowledge work projects. However, you will be amazed by the number of websites that are still being built using the “good old” methods. So, with this example, we’re trying to make things just a little better while realizing this plan is far from perfect.

The important question here is how you come up with the duration of each of the initiatives. Our answer at this moment is to base your assessment on past experience and not dive too deep into the estimation. At this stage, it’s more valuable to merely state what needs to be done and not that much when it’s going to be done. All we need is the scope with some rough start and end dates. When ready, we can move on to the next step.

Step 2. Breaking Down Timeline Project Initiatives into Tasks

When all the major deliverables (initiatives) are in place, it’s time to break them down into actual tasks. When you’re finished, the board would look something like this:

Note that we have the first two initiatives broken down into children tasks that live right below the Timeline into what we call the tasks workflow. The image does not show all of the tasks for all of the initiatives just for simplicity. In reality, all the initiatives should be broken down.

As the image shows, none of the children cards is started yet. Some of them are in the Backlog, which means they are not ready to be started yet. Others are in the Requested area, which is the equivalent of committed work, which the team should start working on as soon as capacity is available.

This two-tiered approach to planning is the second major difference between the traditional project planning and the proposed Kanban planning. When the notion of time plays only on the initiatives level and does not affect the day-to-day tasks, we are free to apply the principles and practices of Kanban, which gives us a significant productivity boost, often reaching 200-300%.

If we track the cycle times of all tasks on the board and maintain them stable enough, we open up the gate for a whole new universe in the project management space. Let’s see what this bold statement is all about in the next section.

The New Paradigm in Project Management

What if someone told you that doing the things described in the article so far would give you superpowers to predict the future? Yes, Kanban can do this for you.

If your bottom part of the board (the tasks workflow) is operated by a stable team, it’s safe to assume that you’ll have collected some historical cycle time data. In other words, the system will know how much time it usually takes for work of type X to be completed.

With that information in place and a bit of magic, the system can evaluate your high-level plan and give you instant feedback about the expected duration of each initiative. This forecast won’t be 100% accurate, as it’s a forecast and that’s encoded in the meaning of the word, but it will be more accurate than most human beings. These predictions are based on proven mathematical and statistical models ( Monte Carlo simulations ) which is a testament to the correctness of the output result.

Now let’s pause for a second and reflect on this new paradigm. We just showed you how you can plan an entire project without spending a single minute of estimating the actual work. All you had to do was define the high-level initiatives and break them down into the corresponding tasks.

Then, assuming that your team has completed at least 30 similar tasks in the past, the system gives you a forecast about the duration of each initiative and therefore the duration of the entire project. How cool is that? It’s pretty cool but that’s not all.

Keeping It All Up To Date

Once you go past the initial planning process, you may want to keep the plan in perfect synchronization with the work of the team. Typically, this is a tedious job, but if you’re a Kanbanize user you don’t have to worry, as the tool will do it for you automatically.

As soon as the first child task of a given initiative is started, the timeline will be updated automatically to reflect the actual start of the initiative. The end date will also be adjusted automatically based on the completion date of the last child task.

Not only that but the forecast gets re-calculated on each task move. You start a task – the system re-evaluates the plan. You finish a task, the system re-evaluates the plan. You do whatever – the system re-evaluates the plan. This is what we call “Continuous Forecasting” and what we believe is the future of Project Management.

Just let that sink in. You, as a project manager, just save yourself all the hassle of:

All this is a fundamental difference to how we manage projects, portfolios and even strategies. We will talk about this in follow-up articles. All we have to do now is address some of the concerns that people have, when presented to these ideas.

A Few Words About the Skeptics

There are several objections to this approach that we hear often:

This Won’t Work as Task Size Is Always Different!

While this is a valid concern, it’s technically not true. Monte Carlo simulations work with any sort of sizes, as they do the forecasting based on your throughput (how much work you produce for a given period of time). So, if your tasks are bigger, the throughput will be lower. If the tasks are smaller, the throughput will be higher.

What will decrease the accuracy of the forecast is task sizes that vary too much. For example, if one task takes an hour and another takes three months, the forecasts will most likely be off. However, if most of the tasks take between 1-5 days and then you have some outliers (you will have them) this stuff will work. The real benefit is that you don’t have to care whether it’s going to be 1 day, 2 days or 3.5 days. All you need to ensure that most tasks take 5 days or less.

What if My T eam Is Changing?

This one is a perfectly valid concern and this method has no answer yet. What would be possible in the future is to run different “what if” simulations, but this is a very sophisticated planning technique and tooling support is not there yet.

Your best bet here is to do whatever you can, which probably means manual re-estimation, accumulate some historical data under the new conditions and then resume using the Continuous Forecasting method. In that case you just need to make sure that you only take into account the historical data that’s valid for the current setup of the team.

What if My Project Does not Look like Anything I’ve Done Before?

The answer here is “give yourself a bigger buffer”. From a procedural point of view, nothing in the method changes. You just need to add more slack in the plan, so that you accommodate for the unknown.

How much bigger should the buffer be? This must be a human decision, preferably of a very experienced person. Tooling is by no means a substitute for experience.

The benefit of this planning and tracking method will be that you will know very soon how accurate your plan is. As mentioned above, as soon as you have some historical data accumulated in the system, you’ll be able to produce reliable forecasts and update the original plan as needed.

What if I Have No Historical Data?

This is definitely a possible scenario but more often than not, you’ll have it. If somebody asked you how much time does it take to buy some groceries from store A, you would be able to answer with some approximation, even though you may have never been to that store.

You will be able to produce an answer, just because you’ve been to other stores in your life and that’s nothing else but historical data.

The problem with historical data is that we rarely have it in suitable formats. That’s why we encourage you to use proper tools that are able to collect and digest this type of information, which can later be used to provide all the benefits of continuous forecasting. Some of the tools will even allow you to import your historical data and then do the analysis described above. In certain situations this has been a life-saver for many.

Conclusion

This method for planning and executing knowledge work projects is going to be the next big revolution in management. We’ve relied on humans to do these kind of things for many years and it’s time to use machines and tooling to get us to the next level.

When you combine Kanban, timelines and the continuous forecasting method, you are ready to face much greater challenges while keeping risk low. As a result, you will achieve greater results and ultimately excel your business.

This method is still very new and not many companies are doing it. Chances are that this type of project management is going to be the standard in less than a decade, so you still have time to be among the first to adopt it and surpass your competition. Give it a chance now!

Related Posts

About Dimitar Karaivanov

CEO and co-founder @KanbanizeInc., Speaker, Author, Lean Thinker, Portfolio Kanban enthusiast, passionate about efficiency at scale and hard rock.

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