Project Planning–CMMI–A vertebral to Project Performance

After managed requirements blog you all just read in the pane, the next stage we come across in the process implementation of CMMI is Project Planning phase. Once an organization has defined an agreed upon set of requirements that are traceable then the next important stage is making a Plan against these requirements. This in fact seems to be the most crucial part and that’s why most organizations have there best team assigned to do the planning of the project. The basic activity in this phase is to translate the requirements into the form of an action plan, which has exact resources, dates, milestones and risks defined , in order to deliver the solution which has been envisaged in the agreed set of requirements.

Mostly the Project managers faces challenges in this particular stage, planning the time, utilizing the resources, allocating the process against the project, planning the activities and mostly in the formal integration of the project plan, but there are ways for a planned process mechanism that can be built and that should be followed in every stage of the project life cycle planning.

Thus defining Process planning — CMMI ‘those undertakings that must correlate to the commitment that we make to the project‘s customer’. There are four ways through which a project planning process area should be managed

• Estimate scope of the project

• Plan , Develop the project plan

• Engage with stakeholders

• Getting commitment to the end and maintain it

The planning part in the project planning decides on the resources needed, exchange of commitments, schedule, and identifying and analyzing project risks.

Estimate scope of the project

Establishing an estimate for project includes the scope, life cycle of the project and estimates on the effort and cost of the overall project. This part is where most organizations are only relying on : estimation instead of an informed estimate, as they do not have a defined rationale or data to back these estimates. Doing good estimates solves half of your problems in Project Planning and vice versa.

Development of Project Plan

This includes Establishing the Budget and Schedule, investigate project risks, data management plan, and plan for needed skills and expertise. Here its worth mentioning that Project Schedule and Project plan are 2 separate entities in most of the cases and should not be mixed together.

Plan Stakeholder Involvement

This includes scheduling stakeholder’s interaction with the team, responsibilities of stakeholders with respect to the project and their commitment of understanding the project deliveries across each stage of the life cycle. Important tip in this stage is to identify all relevant stake holders, including the customer.

Obtain Commitment to the Plan

Obtaining commitment require reviewing plans that affect the project, resolve work and resource levels and obtain plan commitment.This is an optimized project plan process work; that can help us in signifying the deep root cause of the project inefficiencies at any stage and can take us to fulfill the business objectives of the organization.

In the end we would again like to emphasize that Project Planning forms the backbone for any development environment and without having a well defined plan in place the chances of success of the project are good, only if you are lucky all the times.

To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.

~ Anatole France