Background: Project plans are an integral part of any project that last more that a couple days or that has any amount of complexity. While at BlueRock, not only did I develop project plans as necessary to manage the projects on which I was assigned, but I also developed internal guidelines for use on future projects.
Overview: Project plans are the most well known of project planning tools. The purpose of a project plan is to clearly define what must happen and the dependencies between activities. Project plans can also include who will do the work, how long the work will take (estimate) relative to other work. This is separate than a project schedule that defines when tasks and milestones will occur in absolute terms.
Project plans will include, not only the technical steps required, but also the business steps. For instance, the project plan may specify which servers will be used in a particular property; however, the plan must not only include the installation steps that lead up to the technical work, but also the back-end processes of ordering, arranging payment, arranging someone to be on site to receive and catalog shipments and then dispose of the trash.
Project plans should be written with enough detail to ensure that work to be performed is unambiguous but no more. The reasons that the project detail should remain relatively high-level is that time will be marked against tasks and project plans larger than a page and a half become unwieldy to comprehend and work with throughout the project.
At BlueRock, project plans are created in CRM and integrate with the ticketing system and time tracking processes. Under each line item in the project plan, tickets can be made to serve the need for detailed accounts of work performed.
Example:
Doug Geiger