Most of us are involved in projects, be it organizing the Housewarming
ceremony or the Project at the office. A Project usually involved a myriad of
things to do with many unknowns that can potentially derail the Project itself.
David Allen of “Getting Things Done” lays a common sense approach to Project
Planning & Control.
Following are the key steps that David Allen recommends to develop a Project Plan:
1)
What is
the outcome of the Project?...Is it a report, product or just conducting
the ceremony without an hitch?
2)
Be more Specific
about the Outcome?...when is the ceremony? By what date the report has to
go through? Can it be delivered in Phases?
3) Brainstorm for all the activities?...Capture
all the activities to be done on a piece of paper…Don’t worry about the
sequences yet…
4) Break the activities until they are small
enough that you could add to your actions
5) Create the sequence of actions
6) Attach a timeline to each of the actions
You may all wonder what is so new about the above steps, when
it looks to be the natural steps of any planning process. I agree..it is not
radical…but the problem is we do not follow the above steps in planning. Usually
people take the route of unnatural planning .for ex.,Not knowing what our outcome
should be and just start working on the “Work break down structure” on high
horsepower Project planning tools. Instead,the trick to successful Project Planning
though lies in the pre-work to bring out the Unknowns.So try out the natural
planning model and see how if it works……
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