5 Basic Steps to Better Project Planning

One of the most important steps in the PRINCE2 approach is planning. Starting a project entails a great deal of responsibility. Due to the multiple actions involved in planning, it may be both difficult and time-consuming. It entails planning and improving your approach to everything from risk to communications, quality assurance to change management, and so forth.

Yet, far too frequently, planning is rushed, neglected, and undervalued during the project life cycle. Planning may be made more efficient, easy, and successful throughout the project’s lifetime by making modest changes to procedures. Here’s how to make sure your project plan goes smoothly:

1. Include a backup strategy

When faced with impediments during the planning stage, project managers may feel ill-equipped to overcome them. Budget, time, resource, or knowledge constraints can lead to plans being carried out with known flaws. Taking the time to be risk-averse allows project managers to plan for eventualities. It’s possible that you’ll need more resources, or that you’ll need to make substitutes in terms of personnel or contractors, or even a different source of cash. A contingency plan can help to guarantee that things go well in the future. It might potentially be the difference between a project’s success and failure.

2. Allow for adaptations

A contingency plan, likewise, does not have to be set in stone. It’s less about having a “plan A” and “plan B,” and more about knowing that if difficulties arise, you’ll be ready to deal with them. This is reflected in PRINCE2 Agile training. It demonstrates that methods may be adjusted to be responsive, combining the flexibility of Agile with the structure of PRINCE2.

The pandemic has taught us to be adaptive, and when paired with PRINCE2 Agile, we can utilize this knowledge and experience to our advantage during project planning. Continuous monitoring is emphasized in the PRINCE2 Agile framework, which includes Agile practices like sprint reviews and retrospectives.

3. Get visual!

It’s much simpler to envision your project succeeding if you can see it planned out. If you’re not sure where to begin, try utilizing a Project Initiation Document (PID), which may be used as a checklist to visually validate that ideas have been carefully evaluated by you and your team. With this as a foundation, you may grow and change your plans to incorporate risks, contingencies, project controls, and more detailed project plans. You might be able to accomplish this using your standard project tools. You may also use tools like Trello to work through plans in a Kanban approach, or even draw them out in a whiteboard session! Visualizing project plans may be beneficial.

4. Improve the way you communicate

It’s a great opportunity to examine your procedures and make internal adjustments in areas like communication when preparing a project if it’s been a while! Maybe you’ve made some adjustments, but they’ve been transformative and undocumented? In any case, getting everyone on the same page is critical for a project plan to run smoothly, and a documented communication strategy is essential for this.

Define how you’ll interact with your team throughout the project, including the types of channels you’ll use, as well as the frequency with which you’ll communicate. When you have remote and hybrid workforces, bringing teams together is very important. Employee expectations will be managed by consistent, transparent communication, which will also help to increase project productivity and outcomes.

5. Accountability is highly valued

Staying responsible processes are devalued and sometimes disregarded in project planning. Simple daily accountability measures, on the other hand, maybe revolutionary, and it all boils down to how you communicate. For one thing, introducing daily standups, a highly valued Agile Scrum technique, is a wonderful method to keep track of progress and identify any emerging concerns before they create delays.

Another strategy is to use accountability ‘buddies.’ Employees should be paired up so that they may check in with each other. Partners will have a brief talk about what they accomplished the day before, what’s on the schedule for today, and any obstacles they may encounter, similar to daily scrums. This is an excellent method for increasing motivation, productivity, accuracy, and efficiency.

Here at CourseMonster, we know how hard it may be to find the right time and funds for training. We provide effective training programs that enable you to select the training option that best meets the demands of your company.

For more information, please get in touch with one of our course advisers today or contact us at training@coursemonster.com