PROJECT PLANNING IS THE PROCESS OF DEFINING WHAT WILL BE DONE, BY WHOM, WHEN, WITH WHAT RESOURCES, AT WHAT COST, AND TO WHAT STANDARD. WHY IT IS DONE — beyond the obvious: · it forces the thinking that would otherwise happen too late · it produces the BASELINE, without which performance cannot be measured · it exposes conflicts and resource clashes on paper, where they are cheap · it communicates intent to people who will never speak to the planner · IT IS THE BASIS OF CONTROL. AN UNPLANNED PROJECT CANNOT BE CONTROLLED, ONLY WATCHED. ── THE PLANNING SEQUENCE ─────────────────────────────────── STEP 1 — DEFINE OBJECTIVES AND SCOPE. Objectives must be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound. THE SCOPE STATEMENT must say what is INCLUDED and — equally important and usually omitted — WHAT IS EXCLUDED. Most scope disputes arise from what nobody wrote down either way. STEP 2 — BUILD THE WORK BREAKDOWN STRUCTURE (WBS). A HIERARCHICAL DECOMPOSITION OF THE TOTAL SCOPE INTO PROGRESSIVELY SMALLER, MANAGEABLE COMPONENTS. Level 1 PROJECT Rural water supply scheme Level 2 DELIVERABLES 1 Intake 2 Pipeline 3 Reservoir 4 Distribution Level 3 SUB-DELIVERABLES 2.1 Trenching 2.2 Pipe laying 2.3 Testing Level 4 WORK PACKAGES 2.1.1 Clear route 2.1.2 Excavate chainage 0–500 m THE TWO RULES THAT GOVERN A CORRECT WBS: THE 100% RULE — THE CHILDREN OF ANY NODE MUST TOGETHER REPRESENT 100% OF THAT NODE'S WORK. NOTHING MISSING, NOTHING DUPLICATED, NOTHING EXTRA. A consequence worth stating: IF IT IS NOT IN THE WBS, IT IS NOT IN THE PROJECT — so it is also not budgeted, not scheduled and not assigned to anyone. DECOMPOSE BY DELIVERABLE, NOT BY ACTION. Levels should be NOUNS ("foundation", "pipeline"), not verbs ("designing", "procuring"). Actions belong in the activity list derived FROM the WBS, and a WBS built from verbs tends to omit physical scope. THE WORK PACKAGE is the lowest level: small enough to estimate, schedule and assign to ONE responsible party. RULES OF THUMB: the 8/80 RULE (between 8 and 80 hours of work), or "no longer than one reporting period" so that progress is never a guess. STEP 3 — DEFINE ACTIVITIES. Break each work package into the activities needed to deliver it. THIS IS WHERE VERBS BELONG. STEP 4 — SEQUENCE THE ACTIVITIES. Establish DEPENDENCIES, classified as: · MANDATORY (hard logic) — physically unavoidable. Foundations before walls. · DISCRETIONARY (soft logic) — a preferred practice or a chosen method. It CAN be changed, which is precisely why it is where schedule compression should look first. · EXTERNAL — dependent on someone outside the project: a permit, a client decision, an import clearance. THE FOUR RELATIONSHIP TYPES: Finish-to-Start (by far the most common), Start-to-Start, Finish-to-Finish, Start-to-Finish (rare and usually a modelling mistake). LEAD AND LAG: a LAG is imposed waiting time (concrete curing); a LEAD is an overlap allowing a successor to start early. STEP 5 — ESTIMATE DURATIONS AND RESOURCES. Techniques, in increasing order of effort and accuracy: ANALOGOUS — by similarity to a past project. Fast, coarse. PARAMETRIC — from a rate: Rs per m³, days per km. BOTTOM-UP — estimate each work package and sum. Most accurate, most laborious. THREE-POINT — optimistic, most likely, pessimistic; the PERT approach of the scheduling topic. DURATION = QUANTITY OF WORK / PRODUCTIVITY × CREW SIZE, and the productivity figure is the assumption most often wrong. STEP 6 — DEVELOP THE SCHEDULE. CPM/PERT network, critical path, floats, Gantt chart, milestones. This is the next topic. STEP 7 — ESTIMATE COSTS AND SET THE BUDGET. Aggregate the work package costs, add overheads, add CONTINGENCY for identified risks, and phase the budget over time to produce the S-CURVE and the cash flow forecast. STEP 8 — PLAN THE SUPPORTING DISCIPLINES. QUALITY plan, RISK register and responses, PROCUREMENT plan, COMMUNICATION plan, HEALTH AND SAFETY plan, environmental management plan. STEP 9 — ASSIGN RESPONSIBILITY. The ORGANISATION BREAKDOWN STRUCTURE (OBS) crossed with the WBS gives the RESPONSIBILITY ASSIGNMENT MATRIX, commonly in RACI form: for each work package, who is RESPONSIBLE (does it), ACCOUNTABLE (answers for it — exactly one person), CONSULTED and INFORMED. THE RULE THAT MAKES RACI WORK: EXACTLY ONE "A" PER ROW. Two accountable people means none. STEP 10 — BASELINE AND APPROVE. The approved scope, schedule and cost become THE BASELINE. Thereafter they change ONLY through formal CHANGE CONTROL — otherwise the baseline drifts to match reality and variance reporting becomes meaningless.

THE PLANNING DOCUMENTS AND WHAT EACH IS FOR: WBS ................. what work exists ACTIVITY LIST ....... what must be done NETWORK DIAGRAM ..... in what order, and what is critical GANTT CHART ......... when, on a calendar — the communication document RESOURCE HISTOGRAM .. what is needed, when, and where it exceeds availability COST BASELINE ....... the S-curve, for cost control RISK REGISTER ....... what might go wrong and what will be done about it RACI MATRIX ......... who is accountable PROJECT MANAGEMENT PLAN — the assembly of all of the above ── WHY PLANS FAIL — the standard causes, and each has a countermeasure ───────────────────────────────────────── 1. OPTIMISM BIAS. Estimates are systematically too favourable, consistently and across cultures. THE PLANNING FALLACY is the psychological finding that people underestimate task durations even when they have personally experienced similar tasks overrunning. COUNTERMEASURE: REFERENCE CLASS FORECASTING — base the estimate on the actual outcomes of similar completed projects rather than on a fresh bottom-up calculation. 2. SCOPE CREEP. Uncontrolled accretion of small additions, each individually reasonable. COUNTERMEASURE: formal CHANGE CONTROL, with every change priced in time and cost before approval. 3. INADEQUATE WBS — work discovered during execution that was never planned, and is therefore unbudgeted. COUNTERMEASURE: the 100% rule, applied honestly. 4. IGNORING RESOURCE CONSTRAINTS. A schedule that assumes infinite resources is a fantasy, however elegant its network. COUNTERMEASURE: resource levelling — the next topic but one. 5. PLANNING IN ISOLATION. A schedule produced by a planner without the people who must execute it commands no commitment and usually contains errors they would have caught. COUNTERMEASURE: participative planning. 6. TREATING THE PLAN AS FIXED. Conditions change, and a plan never revised becomes a historical document that everyone ignores. COUNTERMEASURE: ROLLING WAVE PLANNING — plan the near term in detail and the far term coarsely, refining as the work approaches. THIS IS THE HONEST RESPONSE TO PROGRESSIVE ELABORATION, and it is standard on long projects. 7. NO CONTINGENCY, or contingency hidden inside individual estimates. HIDDEN CONTINGENCY IS ALWAYS CONSUMED — PARKINSON'S LAW ("work expands to fill the time available") and STUDENT SYNDROME (starting only when the deadline approaches) between them ensure that padding built into each activity is spent rather than saved. COUNTERMEASURE: hold contingency CENTRALLY as a project buffer, released deliberately — which is the core idea of CRITICAL CHAIN project management. THE HONEST SUMMARY, and the sentence worth quoting: "PLANS ARE WORTHLESS, BUT PLANNING IS EVERYTHING." — attributed to Dwight Eisenhower The document will be wrong within weeks. THE VALUE LIES IN THE THINKING THE PROCESS FORCED — the dependencies noticed, the clashes exposed, the risks identified, and the shared understanding created among people who will otherwise interpret the objective differently.