What is it that you are trying to do? The first of the project planning process steps answers this question. At this point you are looking for key success criteria, high level deliverables and overall goals. We’ll get to planning the tasks in detail a little later.

You can often find information for the project plan outline in the business case, or get it from your project sponsor if you aren’t clear on the goals.

Now we come to working out exactly what tasks are required. You can create a project scope document, requirement documentation and a Work Breakdown Structure, or any combination of those things that will help everyone on the team understand the full scope of the work. This is where your skills in how to facilitate productive project planning meetings will be really useful! Remember, curiosity improves project management so keep asking questions! Get the group together and talk about what project planning questions you need answers to in order to establish what tasks are required.

For each task, estimate how long it will take, how much it will cost and assign someone to take responsibility for it.

The project planning process is not the time to create a very detailed project schedule, but you do need an idea of how long the project will take, key dates and milestones.

Take your list of tasks and work out the order in which they need to be completed. For example, you can’t paint the walls of the new office before the building has been constructed. Your subject matter experts will be important here: they should advise on the order for their tasks. The links between tasks that determine the order of work are called dependencies.

Once you’ve got high-level information about how long tasks will take and what order they need to happen in, you can go ahead and create an outline project schedule or timeline. Use a project management software tool to make things easier. You’ll end up with a visual representation of your project work in a format everyone can see and understand.

Some of your stakeholders will be responsible for project tasks, so add their details into the project schedule. This step helps you see who has a lot of work on at any one moment in time. You don’t want your resources to be overloaded, so you might need to make adjustments to the schedule to allow for their other commitments. Remember, many project stakeholders are involved in multiple projects so they might not be available to you on a full-time basis.

The project schedule is an important part of the plan, but you’ll also want to look at how the team will manage other project management processes. Think about how you will ensure the budget is managed efficiently, how you will track and measure quality, and how you will cope with risk and changes. Take the time to consider how you are going to address those important project management processes and document how you will work together.

The main purpose of project plans is to document what is going to happen so everyone knows what is expected of them. But plans change. As the Agile Manifesto says, responding to change is valued. Experienced project managers will tell you that as soon as you start the work you’ll find you need to make adjustments.

If you start the project and realize you need a different approach to managing project risk, for example, then change your practices and update the plan to reflect your new way of working. Just remember to let the rest of the team know that things have changed so they reference the right document. If the changes are significant, you might need to go through the project document approval process again.

Be prepared to be flexible and make whatever changes you need to so the team stays on track.