Open University. M355 Course Team - Software project planning

About this free course

This free course provides a sample of postgraduate study in Business http://www.open.ac.uk/postgraduate/find/business

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Introduction

This course will help you to develop the skills required when planning a project. You will examine the various components of a project plan, and be introduced to a number of tools and techniques to aid planning.

This OpenLearn course provides a sample of postgraduate study in Business

Learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• develop plans with relevant people to achieve the project's goals

• break work down into tasks and determine handover procedures

• identify links and dependencies, and schedule to achieve deliverables

• estimate and cost the human and physical resources required, and make plans to obtain the necessary resources

• allocate roles with clear lines of responsibility and accountability.

1 The planning phase

Once the project brief has been agreed by the project sponsors and approved by the main stakeholders, you can move into the detailed planning phase. The project plan can become a working tool that helps to keep the project team focused on the project's tasks and activities and points them towards completion. It enables managers to keep track of resources, time and progress towards achieving objectives.

All projects are different and the planning for each will be different. The difficulty with planning a unique activity is that there is no prototype from which to predict all the work that will need to be done, so the plan must evolve as work proceeds. Reviewing any similar projects that have been completed within the same organisation or in a similar setting to identify lessons that could be applied in a new project can be helpful.

Planning can be approached by asking a series of questions:

• What actions are needed?
• By when are these actions needed?
• Who is going to do them?
• What resources are required?
• What other work is not going to be done?
• How shall we know if it is working?

Discussing the issues to produce a joint plan with the team usually creates a sense of commitment that can be crucial to the project's success. Identifying who needs to be communicated with at the different stages can be useful here. (Below is a discussion and an example of a to help you with this.)

This course examines the various components of a project plan, and introduces a number of tools and techniques to aid planning.

The communications matrix

A communications matrix is a way of noting who needs to be consulted and at what stage. It can be a formal chart or rough notes, but its purpose is to help minimise the problems that arise when people feel they have not been consulted. The communications matrix below shows an example of a communications matrix for putting a new building unit into use.

A communications matrix

Stages	Operations Director	Area Manager	Site Manager	Marketing Director	Equipment Suppliers	Fittings Suppliers
Initial plan
After first site meeting