Review the different kinds of roles that are needed in a balanced project team

• In a really effective project team, team members should be able to cover the whole range of team roles in Belbin's classification, which he identifies as being action-oriented, people-oriented or cerebral.

• Becoming more aware of the team role(s) that you and your team members prefer to play will help you to maximise contribution and output in your team.

Identify the key activities involved in project planning

Project planning involves:

• breaking the project down into manageable units of work, known as a Work Breakdown Structure, and allocating responsibilities to individuals or groups

• producing a commitment matrix detailing the people, resources and money required for each activity

• identifying the relationships and dependencies between the activities

• identifying schedule constraints and developing a schedule.

Explore two techniques for developing and documenting project plans

• Network diagrams and Gantt charts are the most common techniques.

• A network diagram is a graphic representation of activities over time and the dependency relationships between them. There are two main types: Activity on Arrow and Activity on Node.

• A Gantt chart is easier to construct and to read than a network diagram but provides less information. Each task is represented as a bar against a project calendar; the length of the bar indicates the relative duration of each activity.

Consider how to launch the project

• The planning documents that you have assembled become the project's baseline documentation, against which you will monitor and control your...