TABLE OF CONTENTS Project planning is the process of having a vision for the project and thinking through the strategy for how a project will be implemented to achieve the desired goals. The finished plan will describe what is to be accomplished and how it is to be accomplished as well as stating what will not be done.
Project planning is perhaps the most important part of a project in that it defines goals and strategies by sorting through several courses of action to select the most favorable roadmap. Once the goals that will lead to client satisfaction are defined, all planning leads to their achievement through concentrated effort to describe the roadmap and application of resources to various tasks or work packages.
Project planning is a top-down approach to the continual elaboration of details that explicitly documents the objectives, goals, and strategies necessary to accomplish the project. A successful plan guides the project team to satisfaction of the project's cost, schedule, and technical performance goals.
No single element has more impact on the success of a project than project planning. There are numerous examples of poor planning in projects that caused major replanning efforts during critical times during project execution. Goals have been poorly defined, deliverable products have been redefined, customers have not understood the process, and the project team has been unsure of the next steps. Weak project planning will nearly always yield poor results.
| Note | Successful planning leads to... |
