Back to Basics, Part 7: Planning

Planning is a crucial and highly visible function of project management. The tangible results involve defining the scope, schedule, and cost. But more importantly, planning sets expectations.

The initiation stage lays the foundation for the project. The charter acts as an operating agreement among the stakeholders. However, as the old saying goes, “the devil is in the details.” Planning is where the rubber meets the road.

Unfortunately, I have seen too many projects where planning was neglected or rushed. The consequences were predictable. People were very busy, but their efforts did not support a clear outcome. Stakeholders were furious—the projects experienced changes, delays, and cost overruns.

“Back to Basics” is a series of articles that highlights the project management practices that lead to better, more reliable outcomes. Prior articles covered the state of the industry, the importance of establishing guiding principles, and advice for choosing an approach. The series then described an operating framework, the ways of working, and the initiation phase.

Planning

Contents

Planning
The Project Management Plan
The Project Plan

The planning process and its artifacts flow from the project approach. The approach is grounded in understanding the context, goals, needs, technical complexity, change costs, and team capabilities. Though Predictive, Agile, and Hybrid projects appear very different, their foundations are the same.

The primary outputs of planning are the project management plan and the project plan, which are often conflated. The project management plan outlines how the project will be executed. The project plan describes what, when, and how much. The value of these artifacts lies in the understanding and expectations they represent—not in the documents themselves.

The Project Management Plan

The project management plan outlines how the project will be managed and executed. It sets expectations for both the team and external stakeholders regarding the processes, tools, and methods to be used. It defines the cadence, type, and methods for all stakeholder engagement, from status reporting to risk reviews.

The project management plan serves as the authoritative source for understanding how the project will operate. It integrates the processes, reviews, governance, performance measures, and baselines needed to guide execution. It also includes the baseline scope, schedule, cost, and other performance measures.

The Project Plan

Regardless of the project or approach, a key initial step is establishing scope, schedule, and cost expectations. The tools and documents used to do this will differ. However, not setting these expectations with sponsors and other important stakeholders is an early sign of potential problems.

Predictive Planning

Predictive project planning involves defining and breaking down the scope, creating the schedule, and estimating the budget. Although the process seems linear, it is iterative. Define and decompose the scope, develop the schedule, identify the necessary resources, and estimate the budget. The team and stakeholders negotiate what can reasonably and feasibly be achieved given the constraints.

A primary output of planning is the baseline scope, schedule, and cost. The baselines are agreed-upon metrics used to monitor and control the project’s performance. Any changes to the baseline are approved through the change process outlined in the project management plan.

A key assumption of predictive planning is that requirements and scope are clear and well-defined. The predictive approach works best for projects with high change costs, like road or bridge construction—once you start pouring concrete, you don’t want to change the plans.

Common planning process outputs for a predictive project include:

Scope Statement. Unambiguously describes the project scope (deliverables), inclusions, and exclusions. The project requirements are an input to the scope statement. The scope statement, in turn, is a primary input to the creation of the work breakdown structure and scope baseline.
Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The WBS is a hierarchical decomposition of the project’s scope. Work packages represent the lowest level of detail.
Scope Baseline. The agreed-upon project scope.
Schedule Baseline. The agreed-upon project schedule.
Cost Baseline. The agreed-upon project cost.

Agile Scrum Planning

Agile is optimized for projects where change costs are low, and the specific requirements and scope are unclear. Teams regularly deliver small increments of work, typically every two weeks, to iteratively refine the solutions. Stakeholders provide feedback that guides future planning for iterations.

Agile inverts the triple-constraint. It prefers long-standing, stable teams, making it easier to estimate costs, which are simply the team’s monthly run rate. Since the scope is emergent, the project duration and cost can be set externally by senior leadership—how much should be invested? Therefore, the scope can be adjusted to fit within the time and cost constraints.

Agile planning happens at multiple levels and time horizons. The product vision and product roadmap outline the strategic direction. The roadmap provides a time-phased view of the expected functionality or features and is typically reviewed with stakeholders quarterly.

The product backlog connects strategy to tactical execution. The product backlog is a prioritized list of planned deliverables and may be reviewed monthly. Items can be added, dropped, and reprioritized.

Iteration planning transforms the product backlog into the iteration backlog. The iteration backlog specifies what the team will deliver over the next two weeks. During the iteration planning meeting, the team estimates its capacity—how much work they believe they can complete. Then, items are moved from the product backlog to the iteration backlog until the capacity is filled.

Most Scrum teams use story points to estimate the size of work items. Story points are a composite measure of size, complexity, uncertainty, and other factors. The average number of story points the team completes per iteration serves as the basis for estimating their capacity.

Agile Kanban Planning

Kanban projects share many planning attributes with Scrum—stable, longstanding teams make cost estimating straightforward. Kanban teams have greater flexibility to prioritize and pivot than Scrum teams because they are not constrained by the 2-week cycle, allowing backlog priorities to be adjusted sooner and releasing working software when ready.

Kanban teams focus on optimizing flow. The goal is to deliver work consistently and predictably while improving efficiency and effectiveness. Reducing bottlenecks and eliminating waste are core principles. Instead of using story points like Scrum, they measure throughput and use statistical models to estimate how quickly work can move through the system.

Planning scope and time become flexible. One Agile concept is “bringing work to the team.” In other words, a high-performing team can support multiple applications by managing new features, improvements, maintenance, and support requests. The order of work in the backlog becomes the primary factor determining what gets delivered and when.

Hybrid Planning

Planning a hybrid project is complicated because there is no agreed-upon set of practices or artifacts. The underlying approach(es) will determine how planning is carried out. The methods, artifacts, and expectations should be documented in the project management plan. Successful hybrid planning requires greater intentionality because there are fewer established patterns and no universally accepted set of practices.

Planning establishes the expectations that guide the rest of the project. The specific artifacts and practices will vary, but the objective remains the same: create alignment around what will be delivered, how it will be delivered, and how success will be measured. In the next article, I will explore the execution phase, where plans are translated into results.

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