TABLE OF CONTENTS Before you start the process of creating a project plan, it is important to have an understanding of the project and how it is planned to be executed. On large complex projects, this information is usually available from the following types of documents:
Project Charter or Business Case
Project scope
Functional specification
Requirements baseline
Contract documentation
Plans and drawings
Project execution plan
Contracting and purchasing plan
Equipment lists
Installation plan
Testing plan
Many project managers conduct a Stakeholder Analysis at the start of a project. This process lists all the people and organisations with an interest in the project and their interests.
Key project success factors may be identified from the interests of the most influential stakeholders.
It is important to use the stakeholder analysis to identify all the stakeholder activities and these must be included in the schedule.
It is important to gain a good understanding of how the project is to be executed before entering any data into the software. It is considered good practice to plan a project before creating a schedule in any planning and scheduling software. These documents are referred by many terms such as Project Execution Plan and Project Methodology Statement. You should also understand what level of reporting is required by the project team, as providing too little or too much detail will often lead to the schedule being discarded.
There are three processes required to create or maintain a plan:
Collecting the relevant project data,
Entering and...
