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Foundational Steps in Developing a Project Plan
Project Management · Chapter 3: Building a Comprehensive Project PlanSection 3.1 · lesson 15 of 7313 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
Building an integrated project plan from requirements to approved baselines.
- Explain the project management plan as an integrated set of component plans
- Describe the scope, schedule and cost baselines and how variance is measured
- Sequence the planning steps and explain why planning iterates
- Maintain an assumptions log and run consistency checks across plans
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Transcript
Everything said in the video, section by section (1,742 words). Read along, or search it.
Opening Question
A Correct Sum That Still Went Wrong
Marrowfield's recreation department is moving its swim club's member records into a new sign-up system. Dana Reyes manages the project. Her director, Marcus Bell, wants one cost figure for Thursday's budget meeting. So far, the scope is a single line: move the 12 spreadsheets into the new system. Dana allows 6 hours per sheet, at $50 an hour. 12 times 6 times 50 is $3,600. Six weeks later, the estimate is $8,550. Both calculations were correct. So what went wrong?
Definition
One Plan Built From Component Plans
To see what went wrong, start with what a plan is. Dana walks her planning analyst, Priya Nair, through it. The project management plan isn't one schedule or one budget. It's one integrated whole, built from component plans. Scope, schedule and cost. Quality, resources and communications. Risk, procurement and stakeholder engagement. Each covers one area of the work. But they describe the same project, so a change in one usually forces a change in another. If the schedule puts a test team on the system in week eight, the resource plan must show that team free in week eight. The cost plan must pay for them, and the communications plan must tell them when to arrive. Plans that disagree are just unrelated forecasts. The central rule is that the parts agree.
Baselines
Scope, Schedule and Cost Yardsticks
Some parts must stay fixed long enough to be measured against. A baseline is the approved reference version of a plan component, frozen at approval. Later performance is compared against it. Three matter most. The scope baseline: the approved description of what will be delivered, and the work to deliver it. The schedule baseline: the approved schedule, with its planned start and finish dates. And the cost baseline: the approved, time-phased budget, showing how much money is planned to be spent, and when. Without a baseline, saying we're two weeks late means nothing. There's no agreed point to be late from. With one, the baseline gives one date, the current forecast gives another, and the difference between them is the variance. A baseline isn't the whole plan. A list of open questions changes freely. Baselines change only through a formal, recorded process. A baseline is an agreement about the yardstick, not a claim that the numbers were right.
Planning Inputs
Charter, Business Case and Tailoring
Planning starts with review, not writing. Dana opens two documents. The charter authorizes the project and names its sponsor and manager. It supplies the starting boundaries: objectives, broad scope, authority, and any fixed dates or funds. The business case is the argument that the benefits justify the cost. It supplies the reason the project exists. That reason becomes the test for every later decision about what to include. The first review also settles how much planning the project deserves. That's tailoring, and it's a recorded decision. Two factors guide it. Size: the money, people and time involved. And uncertainty: how much about the work is still unknown. A one-week event with a known format may need a one-page plan. A multi-year system replacement needs every component plan written out and reviewed.
Debate
How Much to Plan in Advance
How much to plan in advance is genuinely disputed. One side says mistakes on paper are cheaper than mistakes after money is spent, and that funders need a firm commitment first. The other says early detail rests on guesses, and that teams learn most by delivering small pieces and watching the results. Part of the question is empirical. How stable are the requirements, and how costly is a late change? Evidence answers that, project by project. Part is about values: certainty for funders, or flexibility for the team. Both sides plan. They differ in how much is fixed in advance.
Sequence
Building the Plan in Order
Once the inputs are reviewed and the effort is tailored, the plan is built in a standard order. First, collect requirements: the needs, wants and constraints that stakeholders place on the project. Then write the scope statement: what the project will, and will not, deliver. Build the work breakdown structure, down to work packages that can be estimated and assigned. Define the activities and put them in order. Estimate resources and durations, and develop the schedule. Then estimate the costs, and set the budget from them. After that come the supporting plans, a review of the whole set, and approval of the baselines. Almost every step consumes what the step before it produced. The order is a chain.
Worked Example
Why the Early Estimate Fell Short
Back to Dana's first number. After the budget meeting, she collects requirements and writes the scope statement. The requirements turn up more work. There are paper registers too, five of them, each needing 15 hours of typing. And each of the six staff needs a four-hour training session. The spreadsheets stay at $3,600. The registers add $3,750, and the training adds $1,200. The total is $8,550. The first figure was less than half of it, short by $4,950. The arithmetic was right both times. The early figure failed because the scope wasn't stable yet: the order of work caused the gap, not poor estimating. Sponsors often ask for early numbers. The safeguard is to label one a rough early figure, list its assumptions, and say plainly that it isn't a baseline.
Quick Check
Dropping Registers to Fit the Funds
Quick check. Marcus can fund only $7,200. Each paper register costs $750 to type. How many registers must Dana drop to fit the funds? Pause, and decide. Two. Dropping one saves $750 and leaves $7,800: still $600 over. Dropping two leaves $7,050, which is $150 under the funds. Faster typing won't close the gap. The choice lies in the scope, so the cut needs Marcus's agreement, and the exclusion goes into the scope statement.
Iteration
Planning Loops Back
That's planning as iteration. The order reads like a straight line, but real planning loops back. Here, cost fed back into scope, and the scope statement was revised. The failure would be to cut the budget silently and leave the scope untouched. This is progressive elaboration applied to the plan itself: adding detail and accuracy as better information arrives. A scope statement may be revised once the WBS is built, then trimmed once costs are estimated. Each pass is a revision before approval, not a failure.
Assumptions Log
Five Fields for Every Assumption
Every plan rests on things believed true but not yet proven. An assumption is a condition taken as true for planning, without proof. A fact has been checked, and can be cited. Assumptions are unavoidable. They turn dangerous when they're forgotten, because an unrecorded assumption fails silently. So Dana opens an assumptions log at charter review, and keeps it beside every later step. Each entry has five fields. The assumption, in one clear sentence: the twelve spreadsheets all use the same column layout. The owner, one named person: Priya. The dates: logged in week one, to be validated by the end of week two. How it will be validated: Priya opens all twelve files and compares the column headings with an agreed list. And what changes if it's false: each odd file needs its own mapping step, adding hours to the estimate, and maybe delaying the schedule. That last field is the one most often skipped, and the most valuable. It shows at once how much the assumption matters.
Quick Check
Assumption or Fact
Quick check. Dana's notes hold three statements, and only one belongs in the assumptions log. Which one? Pause, and decide. The volunteers. Nobody has confirmed they'll give up weekends, so it's believed, not proven. It needs an owner, a date, and a check. The contract and the grant letter are checked documents you can cite. They're facts.
Planning Team
Involving the People Who Do the Work
Dana doesn't plan alone. The planning team includes the people who'll do the work, and subject-matter experts with specialist knowledge. Sam Kowalski, the club's operations supervisor, has run sign-up season for years. Involvement improves estimates: someone who has done similar work knows which steps take longer than they look. And it improves commitment: people who helped set a date tend to treat it as theirs. Neither is guaranteed. A big meeting can be slow, or dominated by the loudest voice. So involve the right people at the right step: stakeholders for requirements, the people doing the work for estimates, and each plan's owner for the review.
Consistency Check
Ninety Hours of Demand, Sixty Available
When the drafts are done, they're reviewed as a set. A consistency check compares plans, to confirm that what one assumes, another provides. Priya checks the schedule against the resource plan. It lists two data analysts, each available thirty hours a week. Capacity is two times thirty: sixty hours a week. But in weeks five and six, three activities overlap: field mapping at forty hours a week, record cleanup at thirty, and test scripts at twenty. Demand is ninety hours a week. The shortfall is thirty hours a week, or sixty over the two weeks. The check fails. The fixes: add another person at thirty hours, stop the activities overlapping fully, or shrink the scope. At review, it's a finding, sent back to the step that can fix it. Reviewers work through fixed pairs: schedule against resources, budget against schedule, scope against every plan, and communications against stakeholders.
Approval
Sponsor Sign-Off and Version Control
When the plans agree, the scope, schedule and cost baselines go to Marcus for approval. Sponsor sign-off is the formal agreement of the person who holds the funds and authority, that these baselines are the project's reference. It turns a draft into a commitment, and it's recorded with the date and the version approved. Version control gives every version a unique identifier and date, keeps the earlier ones, and makes sure everyone works from the current one. An approved plan isn't frozen forever. It stays current through controlled updates: proposed, reviewed for their effect on other plans, approved, recorded and communicated. Compare an informal edit. Someone quietly changes a date in a shared file, and within a week the schedule and the budget disagree again.
Case Resolution
A Labeled Rough Figure Next Time
So, back to the question. What went wrong with Dana's first number? Not the arithmetic. Her $3,600 came before the scope was stable, and nobody had labeled it as a rough figure. Now Marcus has signed $7,050 of approved work, with two registers written down as excluded, and an assumptions log behind it. And when he asks for an early number again, it will come labeled rough, with its assumptions attached.
Key Takeaways
Integrated Plans and Approved Baselines
To recap. A plan is one integrated whole, and its component plans must agree. Scope, schedule and cost baselines are the approved yardsticks for measuring performance. Build the plan in order, from requirements to approved baselines, and expect to loop back. Log every assumption with an owner, a date, a check, and what changes if it's false.
About Project Management at UPI Study
Project Management (Business 230) is a self-paced online course of 73 video lessons in 12 chapters, from starting and defining a project to planning, budgets, scheduling tools, proposals, contracts, execution, monitoring, closure, teams and certification. It carries a NCCRS credit recommendation for 3 semester credits.
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About Foundational Steps in Developing a Project Plan
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