Overview

In general, good project management is simple to explain and devilishly difficult to put into practice. The requirements are clear and straightforward, but each company is different and the circumstances around such simple advice as "get executive support" or "select the reader that can read all your tags" are different in each case. Nonetheless, the rules are tried and true for all significant projects, and it's worth taking the time to get them right before moving on to equipment purchases and configuration.

Project management is an iterative process, and this outline reflects that. This project has four phases. During Phase 1, you make assumptions and estimates that will be confirmed, refined, expanded, validated, and revised during subsequent phases. Each document will be reviewed and potentially revised for each phase of the project. This project planning methodology enables you to revise your assumptions as more precise information is developed. Good project planning may take up to 40 percent of the entire project timeline. Often senior executives are impatient to start seeing readers installed and tags flowing by on the conveyor belt right away and may have little patience for the time spent in planning. But time spent getting the planning right will pay off in an enhanced chance for a successful project. The mechanism is this: first document what you're going to do, and then do it!

It is said that the great director Alfred Hitchcock rarely visited the sets on which his motion pictures were being shot. His planning...