It’s a plan, not a grocery list

Creating a project plan is an art; it really is. A plan should be a facilitated inventory of all deliverables with associated activities organized in such a way as to be tracked and communicated at a granular level. Let’s look at each of those components…

1. A facilitated inventory – The PM should gather all information from the team who should be the expert in the project. This also involves them and gives the team a sense of ownership over the plan
2. Deliverables and associated activities – Plans should be organized around deliverables and activities to perform the work
3. Organizated in such a way as to track – Deliverables should have milestones that are able to be tracked. This does not mean having 40 day long tasks. Milestones should be 5-10 days and able to be tracked
4. Communicated – A plan has to be organized logically and be clean so a project manager can communicate it effectively to the team

I have seen many plans which just look like grocery lists in that they just list out everything that needs to be done. They are not organized, sequenced or shown at a detailed level. This makes them hard to monitor status, hard to communicate to the team and hard to obtain status.

Is this a good project plan?

Now how come I can make stunning project plans and manage several hundred activities, but I always forget something at the Grocery store? Go figure.