Project pre-planning

Project planning is something, that is always necessary when you are about to work on a project. We walked through the To-Do list and schedules, now it is time to see the big picture. Every project has common ground. If you want to make projects and tasks easy and efficient you need to always look closely at few things and do your best to find them. This common ground for every project is your base for operations that will most probably work for your future projects as well.

To plan your project you have to first visualize the results you want. Visualizing the results you can determine the way this project will go. This pre-planning technique helps you see the big picture and build around the idea of the project.

How do you want this project to run? What the project is really about? What will the results be for every part of the project and how will they reflect on your idea? How will that project pay off in the future?

Looking at the future results you want the project to have, you can now focus on the current position you are in. This way you will be able to determinate the steps you need to take for the plan to work and the outcome of the project will be what you expected. You will have to think of the current status of all involved parties and point all the weak links, which you want out of your way.

To plan ahead also requires for you to carefully think of your current financial situation and its involvement in the project. What your current budget is? Is it increasing or decreasing for the past several months? What are your business’s expenses? How will that affect your current finances? What can you do to prevent loss? What can you do to ensure a profit? Your action steps are not only your schedule and to-do lists.

Your action steps are the whole road you want every part of the project to move on. Your road consists of ideas, time management, team management, productivity tracking and ends with achieving the work process flawlessness. Now for that first thing called ideas. Do not single-handedly approve your own ideas. Someone else may have better ones on how your project has to run. This is why brainstorming had been invented. Gather all the involved people and start thinking of the best ideas that will make that project fly.

Time management as ever is essential, create estimated window for the pre-planning to cover all the bases of the actual scheduling process and to-do lists. If you are to try narrowing down all the milestones and tasks that have to be done, without giving yourself time to think it through, will most likely result in a poor execution of both the planning of the project and the project itself.

Team management, in this case, is getting to help your team with explaining to them what the project is about, what the tasks of the project are, who will they have to turn to in any rising case and what their roles will be.

Productivity tracking is about estimation, of the product values your project relies on. You must yet again track down all the issues that may cause your productivity to drop and do your best to have prevention plans up your sleeves.

Work process flawlessness is achievable when you are able to get all the information sorted and turned into working schedules, tasks and employees. The mission is possible and probable. If you forget to pre-plan your project, you will start from nowhere and your results will be more like “hope for success” rather than success. You do not need a team of geniuses to do that; you just need to have your head in the game and eyes on the price. Good luck!