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Project Planning and Scheduling Bundle

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Sure, you could develop the whole plan and schedule by yourself, but it's more practical–and more productive–to involve the whole team. They hold the information you need in order to develop a plan that will guide your project to success. This comprehensive Project Planning and Scheduling bundle will walk you through the steps required to get that involvement and information, so you can build a project plan that will really work.

This step-by-step Project Planning and Scheduling bundle is based on our series of 8 Planning and Scheduling guidelines, which walk you through you the details from Task Identification to Project Plan development. The guidelines are complemented by 17 more templates and checklists providing examples and formats for your immediate project use, in any industry, in any domain. In all, you'll receive over two dozen practical, proven resources for getting your team involved in identifying tasks, developing a work breakdown structure, estimating time and expense, project scheduling, risk evaluation and the trade-off of scope, time, and resources–everything you need to create a thorough and realistic project plan.

You need this bundle if:

You've never lead a team through project planning, or just want a guideline to help ensure you don't overlook anything along the way.
Past project plans didn't have the necessary level of detail, or you need to improve estimates of task completion and resource needs.
You want to know how to do "just enough" planning for a small project–one that doesn't require a 20 to 40-page plan–and you want to know what that would look like.
You need to pull a plan together fast, and you want formatted samples with example information and easy-to-follow guidelines and checklists to ensure you've included all the essential elements.

Task Identification and Work Breakdown Structure
- Planning and Scheduling: Task Identification and Work Breakdown
  This guideline covers the steps for developing a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) to identify all the activities required to complete a project. Several WBS examples are provided.

Assigning Resources
- Planning and Scheduling: Assigning Resources
  This guideline focuses on identifying resources needed for each item in a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). Includes a worksheet for tracking assignments or assignment data before entering scheduling information into another tool.
- Team Roles and Responsibilities List
  This file contains formats and example contents for a Team Roles and Responsibility List.
- Responsibility Allocation Matrix
  RACI has it's place, but this Responsibility Allocation Matrix takes project responsibilities and commitments to a whole new level. Detailed and role-focused, it asks all project team members to consider their key project tasks, the inputs they need, and the outputs they expect to deliver, for a more complete look at the cross-functional dependencies in your plan.

Identifying Dependencies
- Planning and Scheduling: Identifying Dependencies
  This guideline illustrates how to identify work dependencies and provides a table for capturing them.

Estimating Work and Costs
- Planning and Scheduling: Estimating Work and Costs
  A guideline on how to estimate effort, duration, and costs for items in the work breakdown structure (WBS). It includes a table used for assigning task estimates.
- Estimating Process and Methods
  This guideline provides an overview of estimating methods for generating detailed project schedules. It includes a brief description of the purpose, goals, and process of estimating, as well as specific estimating techniques for the project manager and project team.
- Pete's Estimating Laws
  A loosely bound set of Universal Laws that provides the project manager with amusing reminders of possible influences on and errors encountered when estimating work on a project.
- Project Budgets and Cost Tracking
  Spreadsheet formats for documenting the projected costs of a project and for high-level cost tracking.
- Tools and Equipment List
  This template provides a format for thinking through and documenting the tools (e.g. hardware, software) and equipment needed during a project for testing, prototyping, etc.

Project Schedule and Critical Path
- Planning and Scheduling: Project Schedule and Critical Path
  This guideline outlines scheduling activities to perform on WBS tasks that have undergone a first pass at resource assignment, dependency identification, and estimation. The result is an integrated schedule in calendar time.
- Scheduling Checklist
  A checklist to use during the planning and scheduling phase of your project. Contains items to ensure your schedule includes all project work, such as cross-functional activities, testing, and more. Also provides a few guidelines for getting the team through this critical phase.
- Milestone Table with Driver Tasks
  Formats for a milestone table including the completion dates and the status of major driving tasks for each milestone. The second format also includes a column indicating the completion criteria and success factors for the milestone.
Make Trade-offs and Optimize
- Planning and Scheduling: Make Trade-offs and Optimize
  This template provides guidelines for making trade-offs and optimizing the plan after the first pass base schedule has been developed, to address conflicts discovered among the scope, time, and resources/costs.
- Project Flexibility Matrix
  A Project Flexibility Matrix is a simple but effective tool that helps guide tradeoff discussions on Scope, Resources and Schedule during project definition and planning work. The matrix is used to clarify what constraints are flexible and what project goals must be held.
- Project Alternatives Tradeoff Table
  Use this template to cut through all the complex decisions that can plague the front end of a project. The table gives your team a concise way to document (and communicate!) the alternatives you are considering for scope and features, and the impact of various combinations on the project's cost, schedule, resources, and risk. Getting it all onto a page or two can really help a cross-functional team reach agreement on a reasonable scope that meets most important customer requirements.
- Product and Project Risk Assessment and Mitigation Tables
  Risk Assessment tables used during the early project selection process for documenting product risks, as well as several more detailed risk assessment categories for projects moving into full-blown planning. This expanded version includes contributions from Global Brain Inc.'s Quality Rapid Product Development methodology. There are formats and guidelines for assessing the true risks in areas such as market competition, technical innovations, and the nuts-and-bolts, boring-but-potentially-painful things like resource shortages and vendor/partner delivery delays.
- Risk Management Plan
  A high-level plan/outline for ensuring consistent implementation of risk management across an organization, or across a division or group within an organization.
Create Project Plan Document
- Planning and Scheduling: Create Project Plan Document
  This guideline explains how to create a project plan document–a management summary document that provides project essentials like objectives, justification, and how the objectives are to be achieved (including an overview of the time, costs, and people it will take), as well as describing how the project will be managed.
- Generic Project Plan Document
  A template for a typical Project Plan document. The outline originated from a standard developed for technically oriented projects, but most of the sections apply to any project. The sections are annotated to convey the intent of each, so the outline can and should be adapted as appropriate for each situation.
- Project Plan Example – Small Project
  Are a 20-30 page dense project plan and hefty schedule file just too much for that smaller but important effort you've got to get done? No fear, project plans "lite" can take many useful and practical forms. Check out this example from one company's project to unify its Product Development Life-cycle methodology across 3 sites after an acquisition.
- IT Project Plan Document
  A project plan outline explaining how a project will be executed and monitored, in this case an IT or software development project. Covers management of scope, schedule, cost, quality, process improvement, staffing, communication, risk, and more.
- Development Project Plan
  An outline for a Development Plan document that summarizes the project goals and the major activities across the different functional groups necessary to achieve those goals.
- Software Project Plan
  A thorough and detailed template for creating a software development plan, with annotations. It includes making tradeoffs on scope, resources, schedule and other issues with a quality focus, Excel worksheets for capacity planning, and much more.

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Project Planning and Scheduling Bundle