Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Sunday, October 7, 2012
Project Planning
Good planning is the basis of any successful endeavor. Planning helps you to make good, well-considered, robust plans, that, when successfully executed gives great products. A good plan will:
* State the current situation.
* Have a clear aim.
* Use the resources available.
* Detail the tasks to be carried out, whose responsibility they are, and their priorities and deadlines.
* Detail control mechanisms that will alert you to difficulties in achieving the plan.
* Identify risks, and plan for contingencies. This allows rapid and effective response to crises.
* Consider transitional arrangements – how to keep things going while implementing the plan.
A product planning cycle looks something like this:
1. Analysis of opportunities gives reality to the plan. It is important to explore and exploit all available opportunities to determine what is to be done. Creativity tools, SWOT Analysis and Risk Analysis can help to identify opportunities for development or improvement.
2. Definition of the aim gives your plan a goal to focus and concentrate its energy on. A well defined plan will prevent wastage of resources on irrelevant issues.
3. Explore options helps to generate as many different ways for achieving the aim as possible. By spending time looking for these you may find a better solution than the obvious one, or may be able to improve the obvious solution with parts of other ones.
4. Selection of the best approach is sometimes a tough call. This can be made easier by considering the resources and time available or with the use of Decision making tools like Grid Analysis or Decision Trees.
5. Detailed planing shows how to implement selected option. It helps to work out the most efficient and effective way of achieving the aim defined. It is the process of determining who will do what, when, where, how and why, and at what cost. Gantt Charts and Critical Path Analysis can be immensely helpful in working out priorities, deadlines and the allocation of resources.
6. Evaluation of this plan makes sure that the plan will be worth implementing. If it is not, return to an earlier stage and either improve the plan or make a different one. If no plan looks to be producing enough benefit to justify the cost, it is best not to make any changes at all.
7. Plan implementation is the next step once a course of action is selected, and has been proven to be viable.
8. Plan closure involves examining results and drawing conclusions. It is important to identify any mistakes, both to rectify them and to learn from them. The feedback is also noted for future planning.
* State the current situation.
* Have a clear aim.
* Use the resources available.
* Detail the tasks to be carried out, whose responsibility they are, and their priorities and deadlines.
* Detail control mechanisms that will alert you to difficulties in achieving the plan.
* Identify risks, and plan for contingencies. This allows rapid and effective response to crises.
* Consider transitional arrangements – how to keep things going while implementing the plan.
A product planning cycle looks something like this:
1. Analysis of opportunities gives reality to the plan. It is important to explore and exploit all available opportunities to determine what is to be done. Creativity tools, SWOT Analysis and Risk Analysis can help to identify opportunities for development or improvement.
2. Definition of the aim gives your plan a goal to focus and concentrate its energy on. A well defined plan will prevent wastage of resources on irrelevant issues.
3. Explore options helps to generate as many different ways for achieving the aim as possible. By spending time looking for these you may find a better solution than the obvious one, or may be able to improve the obvious solution with parts of other ones.
4. Selection of the best approach is sometimes a tough call. This can be made easier by considering the resources and time available or with the use of Decision making tools like Grid Analysis or Decision Trees.
5. Detailed planing shows how to implement selected option. It helps to work out the most efficient and effective way of achieving the aim defined. It is the process of determining who will do what, when, where, how and why, and at what cost. Gantt Charts and Critical Path Analysis can be immensely helpful in working out priorities, deadlines and the allocation of resources.
6. Evaluation of this plan makes sure that the plan will be worth implementing. If it is not, return to an earlier stage and either improve the plan or make a different one. If no plan looks to be producing enough benefit to justify the cost, it is best not to make any changes at all.
7. Plan implementation is the next step once a course of action is selected, and has been proven to be viable.
8. Plan closure involves examining results and drawing conclusions. It is important to identify any mistakes, both to rectify them and to learn from them. The feedback is also noted for future planning.
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