Project Plan and Why It Is Necessary

The creation of a project plan is the formal documentation of the inner workings of a project, and how it is to be conducted from start to finish. The process to create this formal document has many parts that will be necessary for it to be used by the personnel involved with the project.

The reason for a project plan is so the personnel involved in a project have a formal approved document that they can follow. It is created by the project manager who gets certain instructions and a set of criteria from the sponsors or stakeholders of the project.

In a project plan are many things. This should include the goals and purpose of the plan that are set out by the stakeholders or sponsors of the project. The different divisions of the plan should include the scope of the project. There should also be the many different schedules that will be necessary for the project to be completed, on time and in budget.

Another part that has to be included in a project plan is its cost. This should include the breakdown of the raw material costs, labor cost, along with any marketing cost for the deliverable once it is completed.

There are both summarized and detailed sets a project plan can have. What is important, if it is just summarized, is that the details are documented somewhere else so it can be properly referenced during the execution of the project itself.

To know if your project plan has all the necessary components, you should see if it answers the following about the project. It must be able to answer the “Who, What, Why, How, When, and Where” about the project itself. This is very similar to a press release about a project or item. It has the same components but the purpose of the document is very different.

A project manager knows he has done a good job on the project plan when it is approved by the stakeholders or sponsors of the project. When it is signed, that is the signal for the project to proceed to its initiation and execution so a deliverable can be produced.