How To Create The Perfect Project Plan In 10 Steps

Now let’s learn how to make a project plan—one that works in harmony with the way we manage projects in the 21st century.

We’ve created this project management plan checklist as a handy guide to creating a project plan for any project. Whether it’s a large cake, a large website platform, or even something non-digital, the principles and steps are the same.

Here’s an infographic summary of the steps. Read on for detailed explanations below.

Project Management Plan Checklist

In this project management plan checklist, we’ve simplified writing project plan to ten simple steps:

Define your workflow Establish your planning horizon Break it down Ask, don’t guess Question when questioning Allow time for amends Plan for it not going to plan Finish well Post-project review & optimization Milestones & baselines

1. Define Your Workflow

Make a rough plan. Sketch out the overall flow of your project from initiation to completion. Map out each project phase and the likely activities and tasks required in each phase to complete the project.

When creating a project plan, the temptation can sometimes be to dive straight in to your project planning tool and add in all the tasks that need to get done. But before you add in specific tasks and project milestones, make sure you get the overall project structure right. This means first defining the workflow and what the different phases of work will be. If you get this bit right, it makes adding in specific tasks afterwards much more straightforward. At this stage, you’re not thinking about the actual tasks but how the tasks can be grouped together and the subsets of work within each phase.

2. Establish Your Planning Horizon

Are you being realistic? Work out how far you can accurately plan ahead. Plan in detail only for what you know, and make generous allowances for the rest of the project so you don’t over-commit yourself and your team.

A planning horizon is the is the amount of time that it’s feasible and viable to forecast into the into the future when preparing a project plan. In general, the length of the planning horizon is dictated by the degree of uncertainty in the external environment: the higher the uncertainty, shorter the planning horizon. It might not be at all feasible to plan out the whole project in detail, so plan in detail only for what you know, in the phase that you’re in, and make generous allowances for the rest of the project.

3. Break it down

Get into the detail. Break the project phases and tasks down into small sub-tasks, no longer than a few days each. It makes it easier to identify if any steps are missing, and easier for your team to estimate.

With the workflow established, the planning horizon defined, the high-level planning needs to start to become more detailed – it needs to be broken down into as many small sub-tasks as possible. When you’re trying to accurately estimate how long a stage of the project is going to take, it’s important to split the tasks into as many constituent parts as possible. This means taking a task and defining all the sub-tasks that make the sum of that task, and for those tasks, doing the same so that each sub-sub-task can be assigned a specific timescale.

4. Ask, don’t guess

Don’t make it up yourself. Give your team the context, a rough number to start with, and help them collaborate on estimating properly. Share assumptions, dependencies and work out who can do what, when.

When you’re under pressure to produce a project plan the easiest thing to do is just to guess how long each of these constituent parts might take to complete. That’s an option, but not a particularly clever one. Guessing will not only just give you a poor timing plan, it’ll give you no foundation for discussions with the client, and there’ll be no one else to share the blame if you guesstimate incorrectly.

5. Question When Questioning

When your team gives you an estimate, keep asking ‘why’ and ‘how’ to help them think through their approach, identify any efficiency opportunities and ensure sure you understand what’s included.

Beyond just asking someone to estimate how long something is going to take, you need to help them understand the context around their estimation. It’s no good just asking someone how long something will take in isolation. As they provide you with a timeline estimate, you need to begin to interrogate how they came to the number. You’ll often find that as you begin to tease out the details of their estimation, they’ll begin to think of elements that they forgot to include and you’ll begin to get an understanding of dependencies around individual tasks.

6. Allow Time For Amends

Amends or changes to a project are inevitable. Make time for review and amend cycles, both internally and with clients and project stakeholders.

One thing often missed in creating a project plan it’s allowing time for review and amend cycles. Amends or changes to a project are inevitable. Clients like to change things, and put their mark on a project. So no matter how closely you think you’re aligned with your client on a project, you need to allow for amends.

7. Plan For It Not Going To Plan

Projects never go to plan. Simply planning for the best case scenario or Plan A, isn’t good enough – you need to bake into Plan A, Plan, B and Plan C too.

Treading the line between optimism and pragmatism can be a difficult one when creating a project plan. Creating a project plan which gives the flexibility to mitigate against unforeseen change is critical to project success. Simply planning for the best case scenario or Plan A, isn’t good enough – you need to bake into Plan A, Plan, B and Plan C too.

8. Finish Well

Finishing projects properly can be a tricky business.Make a robust plan and allow ample time for the closing phases of your project as you load content, QA, test, get approvals, make DNS changes, and deploy to production.

Planning out the final phases of a live project can appear to be some of the most straightforward – finish it off and just get it live! However, the final stages of a project can be the most complex as dependencies are fully realised and the importance of having a proper plan in place to make sure everything can be deployed live and the project closed properly is important.

9. Post-Project Review & Optimization

Going live isn’t the end of the project. Build into the project plan a phase for post-live testing and analysis to measure performance, make any optimisations required, and take note of all lessons learned.

One of the most overlooked parts of a project is what happens when it’s gone live. In the euphoria and excitement of delivering a project, scheduling the effective close of a project is sometimes overlooked. All too often a project plan will end with a single milestone, the project live date. While a project might be live, it’s not over. In fact, the end of the first phase of a project should really just be signaling the start of the next phase.

10. Milestones & Baselines

Keep your project on track using milestones so that the project team and client are clear about key dates. Monitor progress using baselines to keep tracking your progress against your original project plan.

In order to help you keep track of whether or not your project is running on schedule, make sure your project is littered with milestones. When the project starts, everyone will be clear about what progress looks like, and it quickly becomes clear if the project is running behind schedule. If you’ll use a project management tool, you can usually set milestones easily using a drag-and-drop, and the software will use these to provide you quick insight about your project status as you go. Using milestones ensure that when the project starts, the project team and the client are clear about the key dates the project needs to hit to stay on track.