Chapter 14
Planning the Project, Stages and Work Packages
In This Chapter
Understanding why you need to plan
Fitting in with organisational formats and requirements
Achieving huge planning power with the product-based approach
Fitting activity planning in with the products
Planning resources
Looking at levels of plan – project, stage, and team (Work Package)
Knowing who does the planning and who checks it
Welcome to planning – probably the most exciting chapter in the book! This chapter covers an amazingly powerful approach to planning in projects, but one that the PRINCE2 community widely misunderstands and completely undervalues. Many people leave out this approach because they can’t really see what product planning is all about. And many PRINCE2 trainers don’t really understand product planning either.
Without planning you have no effective control, and many projects go wrong right at the start because people try to cut back on planning or leave it out altogether in order to save time. But unless you know where you’re supposed to be in the project, you aren’t able to detect whether you’re off track. But the plans are also important to help you find problems and find them early, so that you can solve problems on the plan, not in the project.
Part of a resistance to planning is experience of over-planning in projects where managers have seen piles of documents and diagrams that are never referred to again once they have been approved. But the answer to the problem of over-planning ...