In this lesson we will analyze the three basic principles for planning. We started defining some planning tools, such as the scope statement and the WBS. They are also the tools that, most commonly, are used in the overlapping between the Initiating and Planning phases. The goal of this lesson is not to provide technical details on how we can do a proper project planning, but to understand the main logics behind it. Later, we will discuss about the specific tools. Therefore, the first question that we should ask ourselves is “why should we plan a project?”. Each of you may have various answers, but the most common would probably be: to have a clear view on what needs to happen, when and who has to do it. This is definitely a good reason in support of the planning activities, but it is not the only one. The planning process is the phase in which all the activities and the structure of the project are defined, planning the work in terms of time and costs and also identifying risks and opportunities. So, first of all, we need to identify the boundaries of the planning phase: what should we plan? We consider essential everything that goes from scope definition to the project baseline, which represents when we will use the budget of the project over time. We will see at the end that a good plan should encompass many other things. Still, we start from the minimum requirements for a good planning, covering everything that stays between the scope and the time phased budget. We will see that in order to do this, we need specific methodologies and tools, for planning the time, for planning the costs and so on. But, before even doing this, we need to understand the basic principles that need to be applied for any kind of planning. This phase starts with all the information coming from the initiating phase, such as preliminary objectives. While the final output consists of the final specific objectives and the organization of the project plan. Beside the technical tools, this phase is based on a few highly relevant key principles that we are going to see now. The principles are three. Feed forward control, milestones and the so-called rolling wave approach. Let's start with the first one, the other two are going to be presented in the next lessons. We can think of the project more or less in this way: we've got some objectives, we do a plan, we do a project, we get to certain results. So the first control we can do is just making a comparison between our initial objectives and the results obtained at the end of the project.. And we might discover that they are not aligned , so we didn't do exactly what we wanted to do. This can happen for two different reasons: the first one is a bad plan, so I made a mistake in planning. For example, I planned an activity for a certain amount of time, and it lasted a lot more time. Why can this happen? Probably because it's the first time I do this activity. So I didn't have any previous knowledge in order to understand and know the total length of the activity. But there may other reasons why the final result differs from the initial objective: despite good planning, external causes have hindered the project. For example, I had a problem with a provider, I had a problem with my team, a piece got broken and I had to rebuild it and so on. So there are two main reasons why the final results can be different from the initial objectives. Either something happened or it was a bad plan. In the second case we can create new knowledge: it's normally called lessons learned. We learned that the next time we need to plan something like this, we will have to encompass or foresee more time or more cost and so on. On the other side, if it is something that happened but it was actually not connected with bad planning we will manage it the next time, with the risk management. What is interesting, in both cases, is that we're just learning something that will be useful in future projects, we are not actually doing something to control this project. This means that there must be another kind of control that allows me to really have an impact on my project along the duration of the project. It is called Feed Forward Control: I monitor the project development and, when changes occur, I integrate and change the planning so that it is always up-to-date. So the basic idea is that when I plan a project, I also need to put a lot of different control points in the plan. I need to have many, many control points in order to activate this Forward Control and to be able to use this knowledge along the project to replan the project itself. Said in a different way, the control is not something that you start once you finish the planning. The control is something that you start during the planning, we need to plan the project properly in order to control it in a proper way. In other words, we are not just planning to know what we should do when, but also (and especially) to control the project and replan it during the project itself.
