Is plan the output of planning?

What Is Planning in Project Management?

You may have a great idea for a project, but without planning, your project will remain just that — an idea. Planning is the critical step to take a project from an intangible theory to a tangible result.

What does project planning entail?

To bring a project to fruition, the project manager will need to assemble a project plan. The project plan describes the cost, scope, and schedule for the project. It lays out exactly what activities and tasks will be required, as well as the resources needed, from personnel to equipment to financing, and where they can be acquired. Good project planning also factors in risk and how to manage it, including contingency plans, and details a communication strategy to keep all stakeholders up to date and on board.

Project planning and management

Planning the project typically involves the following steps:

Initiation: This step typically occurs before the project is greenlit. It usually involves putting together a business case document that explains the need for the project, followed by a feasibility study to determine the viability of the project in terms of its cost and projected benefits.
Stakeholder involvement: Identify your project sponsors and key stakeholders. To ensure the success of the project, meet with them to discuss their needs and expectations. Map out the project scope, budget, and timeline with them, and make sure to get their complete buy-in.
Prioritizing goals: A project — and a team — can only do so much. Prioritize your goals to make fulfilling them clearer and easier.
Identifying deliverables: What are the specific deliverables that you and your team are expected to produce? You’ll need to know exactly what is expected of you, as well as when [i.e., the deadlines for each output]. You’ll also want to define what success looks like for each deliverable and develop metrics to track and rank each one.
Scheduling: Using the information in the previous step, you’ll need to map out the project's timeline.
Developing a project plan: As previously described, a project plan lays out the steps needed to bring the project to fruition. It includes all the activities and tasks required in the appropriate order and workflow. The project plan will draw from all the previous steps.
Bake in contingency plans: No project is without hiccups. Make sure you plan for any bumps in the road by assessing the risks associated with your project and putting plans in place to address them.

Once the project has been mapped out, it will need to be presented to the stakeholders, edited if necessary, and then managed. Project plan management includes troubleshooting when issues arise, keeping the project on schedule, and moderating the budget.

How to do master planning in the planning worksheet in Business Central?

When I’m doing master planning in the planning worksheet, my expected outcome will be firm planned production orders and purchase orders that I need to fulfill my production order demands.

This is what happens in the video

So my complete list of firm planned production orders from 2 weeks to 3 months, for instance, would be everything that I expect to release at the dates that is here and on those production order, I have material requirements and capacity requirements.

So this master plan is creating if I’m going into the order, and looking into the line on the components, I can see what will be the expected component for an order like this and I can view my routing, meaning what would be the expected capacity need for an order like this, and I can go further from my routing into my capacity need by navigating the line and looking at my allocated capacity and those entry are the one used in the works and the load and this is the entry I can use for my capacity planning.

So all the point of doing master planning is to break down material requirements and capacity requirements and being able to make a plan out of that.

Main Body

Click play on the following audio player to listen along as you read this section.

After the project has been defined and the project team has been appointed, you are ready to enter the second phase in the project management life cycle: the detailed project planning phase.

Project planning is at the heart of the project life cycle, and tells everyone involved where you’re going and how you’re going to get there. The planning phase is when the project plans are documented, the project deliverables and requirements are defined, and the project schedule is created. It involves creating a set of plans to help guide your team through the implementation and closure phases of the project. The plans created during this phase will help you manage time, cost, quality, changes, risk, and related issues. They will also help you control staff and external suppliers to ensure that you deliver the project on time, within budget, and within schedule.

The project planning phase is often the most challenging phase for a project manager, as you need to make an educated guess about the staff, resources, and equipment needed to complete your project. You may also need to plan your communications and procurement activities, as well as contract any third-party suppliers.

The purpose of the project planning phase is to:

Establish business requirements
Establish cost, schedule, list of deliverables, and delivery dates
Establish resources plans
Obtain management approval and proceed to the next phase

The basic processes of project planning are:

Scope planning – specifying the in-scope requirements for the project to facilitate creating the work breakdown structure
Preparation of the work breakdown structure – spelling out the breakdown of the project into tasks and sub-tasks
Project schedule development – listing the entire schedule of the activities and detailing their sequence of implementation
Resource planning – indicating who will do what work, at which time, and if any special skills are needed to accomplish the project tasks
Budget planning – specifying the budgeted cost to be incurred at the completion of the project
Procurement planning – focusing on vendors outside your company and subcontracting
Risk management – planning for possible risks and considering optional contingency plans and mitigation strategies
Quality planning – assessing quality criteria to be used for the project
Communication planning – designing the communication strategy with all project stakeholders

The planning phase refines the project’s objectives, which were gathered during the initiation phase. It includes planning the steps necessary to meet those objectives by further identifying the specific activities and resources required to complete the project. Now that these objectives have been recognized, they must be clearly articulated, detailing an in-depth scrutiny of each recognized objective. With such scrutiny, our understanding of the objective may change. Often the very act of trying to describe something precisely gives us a better understanding of what we are looking at. This articulation serves as the basis for the development of requirements. What this means is that after an objective has been clearly articulated, we can describe it in concrete [measurable] terms and identify what we have to do to achieve it. Obviously, if we do a poor job of articulating the objective, our requirements will be misdirected and the resulting project will not represent the true need.

Users will often begin describing their objectives in qualitative language. The project manager must work with the user to provide quantifiable definitions to those qualitative terms. These quantifiable criteria include schedule, cost, and quality measures. In the case of project objectives, these elements are used as measurements to determine project satisfaction and successful completion. Subjective evaluations are replaced by actual numeric attributes.

Example 1

A web user may ask for a fast system. The quantitative requirement should be all screens must load in under three seconds. Describing the time limit during which the screen must load is specific and tangible. For that reason, you’ll know that the requirement has been successfully completed when the objective has been met.

Example 2

Let’s say that your company is going to produce a holiday batch of eggnog. Your objective statement might be stated this way: Christmas Cheer, Inc. will produce two million cases of holiday eggnog, to be shipped to our distributors by October 30, at a total cost of $1.5 million or less. The objective criteria in this statement are clearly stated and successful fulfillment can easily be measured. Stakeholders will know that the objectives are met when the two million cases are produced and shipped by the due date within the budget stated.

When articulating the project objectives you should follow the SMART rule:

Specific – get into the details. Objectives should be specific and written in clear, concise, and understandable terms.
Measurable – use quantitative language. You need to know when you have successfully completed the task.
Acceptable – agreed with the stakeholders.
Realistic – in terms of achievement. Objectives that are impossible to accomplish are not realistic and not attainable. Objectives must be centred in reality.
Time based – deadlines not durations. Objectives should have a time frame with an end date assigned to them.

If you follow these principles, you’ll be certain that your objectives meet the quantifiable criteria needed to measure success.

Text Attributions

This chapter of Project Management is a derivative of the following text:

What is a plan in planning?

Planning is an active way of discussing the goals, objectives, strategies, and tasks that we need to accomplish. Plans are the documentation of planning. Since things change, plans need to get updated on a regular basis.

What are the key outputs in project planning?

Key outputs – Deliverables, Change Requests, Updates to the Project Plan, Quality Reports, Project Team Assignments, Updates to the Issue Log.

What is called a planning?

Planning is the process of thinking regarding the activities required to achieve a desired goal. Planning is based on foresight, the fundamental capacity for mental time travel. The evolution of forethought, the capacity to think ahead, is considered to have been a prime mover in human evolution.

What are the inputs and outputs of the planning phase?

Planning phase determines the scope of the project as well as the objective of the project. It begins with the outputs of initiation phase [charter, preliminary scope statement, and project manager]. The output of the planning phase serves as the input for the execution phase.