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Today’s Mantra of Project planning by Rajan Agarwal, Program Manager, Ebix

Today’s Mantra of Project planning

By : Rajan Agarwal, Program Manager, Ebix
Industry : Management & Strategy Consulting Functional Area : Project Management
Keywords :

Project Management

TODAYÂ

Project Planning

Mantra

Project Plan

Activity:  2 comments  279 views  last activity : 07 06 2010 20:18:04 +0000
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Planning is a one of the difficult tasks, it needs creative activity and so many variables to consider before you plan. The biggest problem is you do not know much of these variables, you do not know how circumstance will go, until you face and encounter those. Planning, in real sense, is putting these circumstances, objectives, and actions into an equilibrium state. Achieving this equilibrium is real job of planning and this needs real effort, brainstorming and an experience. Success of a plan is directly proportional to its equilibrium state.   What is the best strategy and approach to have a project plan? I went through number of theories and concept about planning, which says follow steps in a particular order, and this produces a good plan. It can be a good plan for good conditions, but absolutely not a workable plan for real software development environment.  The workable project plan is a plan that should satisfy all the constraints imposed on the project, and this constraints list is endless. Looking at the dependencies of constraints, unpredictability of the circumstances, we cannot just sit down and cope up with a project plan. What my experience is to have an initial plan considering number of constraints, but satisfying one or two major constraints. Then we need to refine this plan iteratively till the time it fulfills all constraints. A good plan gets developed based on the criticality of the constraints and established relationship among these constraints.  If we look at the practical approach for project planning, I prefer iterative approach that is perfectly suitable to software industry. We need to collect all the variables management objectives, client’s perspective, development needs, resource expectation, change in technology and many more. Understand each constraint and satisfy one by one, till the time you get a really developed plan. Sometimes, there are certain information, we as a development project manager feel is not relevant to us, but one should look into these detailed information, in order to execute and manage the project.  I agree success of a plan highly depends on its execution. But I strongly believe in “If we fail to plan, we plan to fail”.
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2 comments on "Today’s Mantra of Project planning"
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  Commented by  varsha ., Technical manger(QMS)    | 11 14 2008 07:44:53 +0000 
gud sharing
  Commented by  Shikhar Sharma, Tech Architect, Sapient Corporation    | 09 30 2008 13:36:34 +0000 
In addition to what is stated above, it would be real good if the jobs are divided into smallest peices and then based on the heirarchy, should be distributed to the related person. A good plan would be an aggregate of estimates from people with expertise in their fields and then adding a buffer to it. Then deciding for ABPs and HPs to get a fair calculation. Even if it is a resource distribution or development task, or analysis a good plan relies on not doing everything single handedly.
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