Extract from Guide 2: How To Scope and Plan a Project in a Day:

Price: € 395 - Free to ETP/IP Subcribers

Guide 2: How to Scope and Plan a Project in a Day

1 Scoping and Planning a Project in a Day

1.1 Motivation

If you don't scope and plan the project in a day, what's the alternative? It goes something like this:

1. Somebody identifies some kind of need or requirement or problem that needs to be solved
2. Based on this somebody does some ferreting around and then writes a proposal / business case / specification
3. This is reviewed by the stakeholders (those people affected by the project) and the reviews are fed back to the author of the document
4. There are updates to the document, plus perhaps flurries of e-mail exchanges, phone calls, requests for information and meetings to resolve various issues
5. Items 3 and 4 get looped around a number of times until finally …
6. There is agreement on what we are going to do
7. Then somebody is charged with building a plan
8. That somebody does some ferreting around and then writes a plan
9. That plan is reviewed by some or all of the stakeholders and the reviews are fed back to the author
10. There are updates to the plan, perhaps more e-mails, phone calls, requests for information and meetings - particularly if there is a gap between what the stakeholders want and what the project team say is possible.
11. Items 9 and 10 get looped around a number of times until finally …
12. There is agreement on the plan.

This process can take weeks … months … years, in some cases.

As an alternative to all of this carry on, you can scope and plan the project in a day. If the notion appeals to you then here's how you do it …

1.2 You don't have to take my word for this

In their book, Developing Products in Half the Time [1], the authors Smith and Reinertsen refer to the beginning of the project as 'the fuzzy front end'. They say this: 'Time is an irreplaceable resource. When a month of potential development time is squandered, it can never be recovered … each month of delay has a quantifiable cost of delay. Our goal as developers is to find opportunities to buy cycle time for less than this cost. These opportunities, large and small, appear throughout the development process. There is, however, one place that we could call the 'bargain basement' of cycle time reduction opportunities. It is the place that we consistently find the least expensive opportunities to achieve large improvements in time to market. We call this stage of development the Fuzzy Front End of the development program. It is the fuzzy zone between when the opportunity is known and when we mount a serious effort on the development project.'

If the 'fuzzy front end' is where 'opportunities to achieve large improvements in time to market' are greatest, then scoping and planning a project in a day is way of maxing out those opportunities.

Projects can often be very start-stop in nature. We do some stuff and then we have to wait, for example, for reviews, or approval or for input from other people. Nowhere is this truer than in the fuzzy front end. Everyone believes they have something to contribute, lots of people want 'signoff', and there are always those who feel that their input is being ignored. At the same time, because the project hasn't really yet gotten off the ground, there are always a million and one things more immediate and pressing. The net result of all of this can be a long and frustrating period while requirements are identified, nailed down and agreed. We can circumvent all of this by concertina-ing them into one decisive, devastatingly effective event called a Project Scoping and Planning Session.

1.3 Benefits

In broad terms, the benefits of this approach are:

Projects launched in a day. The project is actually running by the end of the day. There is no quicker and more cost-effective way to begin a project

• Clear project objectives, project requirements and agreement / buy-in on these from the stakeholders
• Accurate estimates upon which firm commitments can be made
• Aclear picture of how the project will unfold
• A kick-start to the project.

What you get:

• 35-page Guide giving step-by-step instructions on how to scope and plan a project in a day
• Briefing note for participants in the 1-day Scoping and Planning session
• Sample memo to send to participants
• Sample Project Scope document
• Template Project Plan in MS Project
• Risk Analysis template in Excel
• Full-scale, industrial strength, complete plan for a software project in MS Project.

Table of Contents

Introduction
What's this Guide about?
How is the Guide structured?
1 Scoping and Planning a Project in a Day
1.1 Motivation
1.2 You don't have to take my word for this
1.3 Benefits
1.4 The Method
1.5 The Facilitator and the Scribe
2 Preparation
2.1 What you need to get the attendees to do
2.2 What you need to do
3 The Session
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Part 1 09:00 - 10:45 Goal of the Project
3.3 Part 2 10:45 - 15:00 Plan for the Project
3.4 Part 3 15:15 - 16:15 Risk Analysis of the Project
3.5 Part 4 16:15 - 17:00 Next Actions
4 Completion
5 An Actual Scoping and Planning Session
5.1 Scoping the Project
5.2 Planning the Project
References