In project management, a project plan is a formal document that explains the goals, objectives, purpose, etc. of the project. Basically, it provides guidelines on strategic planning, procedure, work plan, employee management, schedule and budget. Here, I’ll walk you through how to create a project plan, the elements of a project plan, the benefits, and the different types of plan templates.
Introduction to the project plan template
Like other project management templates and documents, a project plan template provides a standard, predefined format that helps you create your own project plan.
In addition, it contains essential elements that a project needs to develop a plan. These elements include project scope timelines, stakeholders, budget, communication and risk plan.
This plan concerns the initiation, management and conclusion of a project using certain methods and techniques to cover all its relevant aspects. Several data, tables and graphs are included in this plan.
It is not possible to add such substantial elements with ordinary methods of documentation and regular functionality, infect there is usually a formatted project plan document specially designed for this purpose.
This planning template allows you to avoid exploring too many complications and formalities in presenting statistical data, by organizing your materials in an orderly manner. Instead of adjusting everything manually, you just insert the relevant data into its space and you’re ready with a long draft page.
Project Plan Document Template Format
There are many things that you need to add and present formally in a sequence that is generally acceptable and within set professional parameters. In a detailed project plan, a list of necessary important elements is present.
Some of the highlighted chapters of this plan are listed below here:
- Initial estimate of resources and their planning
- Charter of a team and manpower available
- Workload distribution plan
- The estimated timeframe for the completion of the project
- Main work strategies of the managerial roles deployed
- Monitoring and evaluation mechanism
- Roles and responsibilities
- Scope of the project and its profitability
- Major threats and sharp risks
- Policies and trending factors that may influence your project
These are the necessary substances that help make your draft look more professional in its composition. Using this sequence and order of elements, you can create such a plan for any type of industrial, construction, marketing, IT or other project.
Project Plan Document Basics
There are basic elements of a project plan that are part of any plan. These elements include project scope, schedule, budget and deliverables. But in addition to these, there are 10 other items that must be included:
Business rationale and stakeholder requirements
It is important to identify and define the main goals of the project, the objectives, the purpose of this project, the benefits of this project, the needs of the stakeholders and what they want, before launching the project. All these steps must be completed before the project initiation phase or PID.
Stakeholder requirements are very important in a project plan because if your plan does not fully meet stakeholder requirements in terms of product, outcome, or financial benefits, you can lose those stakeholders. You can also use a stakeholder plan for better management.
Project requirements and objectives
However, a project plan is a living document that required constant revisions and adjustments to achieve project goals. If your project is not aligned with the goal, it will lead to financial crises.
Another important factor is the project requirements, which include the type of resources you need to complete this project, human resources, material resources, labor, computer technology, planning infrastructure, maps, project budget, market share, marketing strategy.
Project Scope Statement
PSS is a basic document that explains the background of the project, its benefits, approaches and methods, and the requirements to complete it.
This type of document makes it possible to conclude agreements with personnel and external companies in terms of the purchase of their services and products.
Project deliverables and deadlines
In this step, you need to identify and assess project deliverables and project timelines. You can use a scope statement document as a reference for draft deliverables. You can also add details about who will be working on it and when. Setting due dates helps team members remind them to speed up the progress of a task.
So first you have to use the WBS model, which will break down the project plan into tasks that you can easily assign to team members or teams.
You can also use the Project Portfolio Dashboard from where team members can perform their daily tasks and submit reports there, as well as they can ask for help if needed or request project change.
It is strongly recommended that stakeholders be consulted before making any changes to the project or task management.
Project planning
Without a voucher project schedule you cannot complete your project according to your plan on time.
In a planning plan, you estimate task completion time, project completion time, work schedule, employee roaster, and define task dependencies. This plan must be synchronized with the project timelines from which everyone can see what phase their project is in? And how much time is left to finish it?
Risk assessment and risk plan
Like other important project documents, risk assessment and risk management plans are also the backbone of a project.
Because without a risk assessment, you can’t know what kind of risk factors their project might have and what kind of risk management plan might work for a known risk. Indeed, without risk assessment, you cannot make a counter-risk plan and this can lead you to the failure of the project.
You can also use a SWOT analysis template to manage the strengths and weaknesses of your project. This technique will help you make a better counter plan.
Roles and responsibilities
Now is the time to define the roles and responsibilities of the team members, from top to bottom in order.
Better clarity helps team members and other stakeholders identify who is doing what and who is responsible for what task.
You can use RACI Matrix Chart for this purpose. In which you identify the role of the project manager, the role of the project sponsor, the responsibilities of the team members, their main tasks.
For now, the project owner (primary project sponsor) invests capital in a project, so he is eligible to review and approve the project plan, the duty of the project manager is to make a project plan, the team leader directs the team member according to the plan and his instructions.
Other team members include the Change Manager, Execution and Procurement Manager, Quality and Risk Control Manager who work in their specific areas.
For example, a purchasing manager creates a procurement management plan for a project.
Resource allocation and management
In this step, project managers come up with a roaster-like plan that explains who will use what kind of resource when and when. As well as, when that resource is available to other team members or teams.
This smart approach saves time and resources in case of waste. However, it is important to establish dependencies and priorities between team members based on the nature of their work.
For this purpose, project managers use a resource capacity management plan.
Quality Assurance plan
A quality assurance manager plans the quality assurance guidelines under the supervision of the project sponsor and the project manager. The basic purpose of this plan is to make sure whether their project meets the proposed standard or not. What kinds of policies can make their project conform to their plan.
Thus, from the project initiation phase to the completion phase, a quality assurance manager continues to audit each task and each phase to maintain quality.
Basically, this plan avoids mistakes and disapproval before delivering the product. So, before developing a quality assurance plan, you should define the standards, acceptance criteria, and policies for the project. And these criteria and policies will play a vital role in the QA inspection process.
Communication plan
Finally, a communication plan is another basic project plan document that helps team members, project managers, stakeholders, and other external agencies communicate with the relevant person in any situation.
Basically, it is a hierarchy of a company, or a mechanism that explains the structure of the company and its hierarchy of work.
Within an organization, this plan helps team members communicate with each other and they can ask for advice and help.
Like project managers, use this plan to communicate with team leaders to get additional instructions on a project and request a progress report.
The team member can use this plan to communicate with project managers and team leaders to get help and discuss issues.
So, remember, always make a communication plan in a practical way that provides ease to consumers and establishes a stronger communication link inside or outside with the staff.
Project plan document
To record detailed data and details regarding your project plan, there are exclusively designed Word templates that have pre-structured categories and data ordering that helps you instantly assign useful information in the right segment so that you can generate a workable plan.
These templates are set with format, font style, font size, title adjustments, assessment tools, and demographic options. Apart from that, there are many sequential complications that you have to overcome while writing this draft.
When creating accurate and optimized document templates, you should always be aware of all formal complications and parameterisation modules regarding data adjustment. Also, you need to know about rating and review features.
