Fundamentals of Project Management, Third Edition

Suggestions for Effective Planning

Here are some ideas to help you plan effectively:

• Plan to plan. It is always difficult to get people together to develop a plan. The planning session itself should be planned or it may turn into a totally disorganized meeting of the type that plagues many organizations. This means that an agenda must be prepared, the meeting should be time-limited to the degree possible, and people should be kept on track. That is, if someone goes off on a tangent, the meeting facilitator should get the person back on track as quickly as possible. There are many excellent guides to running meetings (e.g., Mining Group Gold, by Tom Kayser [Kayser, 1995]); the reader is referred to those.

• The people who must implement a plan should ...