6 Reasons Why You Need A Project Plan

You do have a project plan, don’t you? Most project managers would look at me with horror if I asked them if they had a plan, but many people don’t stop to think about why we bother with project planning. After all, it’s just something that project managers do, isn’t it? It is expected that the project manager will wave a piece of paper at you with a Gantt chart and some dates on, because that’s what project managers are like.

But have you ever really thought about the purposes of the project plan? It isn’t just something that project managers produce for fun! It’s an integral part of managing the project and it’s key to making sure that your project is successful. Here are 6 reasons why your project plan is so important.

1. It Tells You How Long The Project Will Take

Project management planning software will calculate the length of time that your project will take from the information that you input. If you already have a good idea of the tasks and durations, this can be invaluable as it will save you a lot of manual calculations. You can, of course, work out your project plan manually with sticky notes and a big expanse of wall in the office, but frankly most people don’t do it that way anymore. Get yourself a good software tool and let it do the heavy lifting to crunch all the data and come up with the definitive length of time that your project will take.

2. It’s A Good Communication Tool

The plan is a good thing to share with the team and with other project stakeholders. It’s an easy way to visually display exactly what they will be doing and when tasks need to happen. As work gets marked as complete it’s also a good way to demonstrate what progress is being made.

An up-to-date plan also forms the basis of your project reporting. The data can flow into your project dashboard or other report templates, and this will save you time when it comes to preparing documentation and progress updates for your stakeholders and project sponsor.

3. It Enables You To Allocate Work To The Team

Tasks and durations are one thing, but your plan also has another important function: it lets you allocate work to the team members. Once you know what is required and when it has to be done by you can select the most appropriate resources and allocate the work to them. Then they can see this in their personal work queue and make sure that they prioritize their time to get the tasks completed by the agreed dates.

Without a project plan you wouldn’t know what needed to happen when, so it would be much harder to schedule resources to work on activities. You would end up doing it all at the last minute and that could mean that some of your critical team members would not be available due to commitments on other projects.

4. It Shows What The Project Will Deliver

The plan lists all the tasks and it is a very good way of explaining to other people exactly what the project will deliver. It also provides a cross-reference for you and other stakeholders. If you have missed off a chunk of activity designed to deliver a certain requirement, then the person who wants that requirement will no doubt be sure to tell you!

5. It Lets You Monitor Progress

Project plans are living documents. That means that they are constantly updated. You may be updating your plan daily and making substantial changes to it every week. As a result, it lets you monitor progress in real time.

It’s even better if you can get your project plan linked to time sheet information or work progress information completed by the team as this will give you a real time data feed of information for monitoring progress.

If nothing else, the plan gives you the mechanism to tick off tasks as completed as and when the work is done, and this lets you see progress in a very visual and comprehensive way.

6. It Shows You The Dependencies Between Tasks

The project plan also highlights the dependencies between tasks and makes it really obvious if something is linked to something else. This will help you do the work in the right order and make sure that people aren’t sitting around waiting for another task to be completed before they can start on their work. This will save you a lot of time, and without a clear project plan you wouldn’t have the ability to plan for upcoming activities with as much clarity. It would be hard to see how tasks linked together and, if you were managing without a plan, there’s a high chance that you would overlook something and that this would cause delays.

You can extend the dependencies shown on the project plan to reach to other projects as well, not simply the dependencies between tasks within your project. This can give you a clue about when other projects are relying on deliverables produced by your project, or vice versa. In this way it can act as a prompt for you to talk to other project managers about how their project is going, and check in on progress with both your team and others.

So, to go back to my original question, you do have a project plan, don’t you? If not, maybe this article has convinced you that you should have one, and if you already do have one, hopefully it has helped explain why you spent all that time putting it together!