Plans

• Purpose
• Defined
  • What is a plan?
  • What is planning?
  • Levels of plan
  • The Project Plan
  • Stage Plans
  • Team Plans
  • Exception Plans
• The PRINCE2 approach
  • Philosophy
  • Prerequisites for planning -
    design the plan
  • Define and analyse the products
• Prerequisites for planning
  • Write the Project Product Description
  • Create the product breakdown structure
  • Write the Product Descriptions
  • Create the product flow diagram
• Identify activities and dependencies
  • Activities
  • Dependencies
• Prepare estimates
• Prepare the schedule
  • Overview
  • Define activity sequence
  • Assess resource availability
  • Assign resources
  • Level resource usage
  • Agree control points
  • Define milestones
  • Calculate total resource requirements and costs
• Analyse the risks
• Document the plan
• Responsibilities

Key sections

• Introduction
• Business case
• Organization
• Quality
• Plans
• Risk
• Change
• Progress
• Introduction to processes
• Starting up a projectDirecting a project
• Initiating a project
• Controlling a stage
• Managing Product Delivery
• Managing a Stage Boundary
• Closing a Project
• Tailoring PRINCE2 to the project environment
• Directing Projects with PRINCE2

The PRINCE2® approach

Analyse the risks

This planning activity will typically run parallel with the other steps, as risks may be identified at any point in the creation or revision of a plan.
Each resource and activity, and all the planning information, should be examined for its potential risk content.

All identified risks should be entered into the Risk Register (or the Daily Log when planning the initiation stage).

Once the plan has been produced, it should still be considered a draft until the risks inherent in the plan have been identified, assessed and the plan possibly modified.

See the section covering ‘Risk’ 8 for more details on identifying and analysing risks.

• Omission of plans at the appropriate management level(s)
• Lots of resources joining the project at the same time can slow progress and cause communication issues (plotting an S-curve for the resource profile over time can identify this – steep curves should be avoided)
• The plan includes unnamed resources, causing the productivity of the actual resource to differ from the estimated productivity in the plan
• The plan contains a high proportion of external dependencies
• The plan uses untested suppliers or is dependent on new technologies
• There is a high proportion of activities on the critical path – a delay to any one of them will delay the plan
• The plan does not allow for sufficient management decision points such as stage boundaries
• There is not much float in the plan (creating a histogram showing the number of activities by amount of float is a useful way of identifying this risk)
• A large number of products are to be completed at the same time [see 'The Complete Time Management package']
• The plan is time-bound by fiscal boundaries (e.g. the budget cannot be transferred from this year to the next) or by calendar boundaries (e.g. millennium bug projects were calendar-bound)
• The schedule shows many paths narrowly paralleling the critical path are likely to become critical themselves if there is a minor slip.

PRINCE2® is a Registered Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce in the United Kingdom and other countries.