You know why you do a project plan, right? Lots of people think that producing a plan and project planning is just something that ‘project managers do’, but it really does serve a useful purpose when it comes to managing your project.
Here are 4 benefits why project plans are an essential tool that you really can’t do without.
1. They help track progress
This is the most obvious one – you can’t track project progress unless you have something to track against. The project plan serves as your road map to success. By marking off what you’ve managed to achieve on your Seavus Project Viewer Gantt chart you’ll be able to see at a glance what’s completed and what isn’t.
If you spot something that should be completed and isn’t yet, then you can do something about it. If you didn’t have the plan, you’d be relying on your gut feeling to tell you that something was going a bit wrong, and that can be unreliable!
2. They achieve buy-in
Project plans are a good communication tool as well, especially if you get other people to input into the plan and help you put it together (which of course you do, don’t you?). If someone on the team helps prepare the estimates they are far more likely to stick by them. If you give them the task deadlines, you could find that they push back and say that they aren’t achievable because they never had any say over the final dates.
Work with your team to get collective responsibility for the milestones and key dates on your plan, and get it all documented on your Gantt chart.
3. They focus the team on the objectives
Plans help show you the end goal. You can see how each element of the project fits together to ensure that overall, the targets are reached. Again, this can be a great communication tool as it provides that big picture road map for where you are taking the team and how you are going to get there.
At a lower level, knowing what task is on the plan for this week helps focus team members on what needs to be done right now. That means you don’t have to keep telling people what to do because they can access the plan and see for themselves what their assignments are for the upcoming weeks.
4. They help you get better
You can use your plans as a way to check your estimates. If one project task is routinely taking longer than scheduled, then you know that your estimates weren’t that great in the first place. You can revise your estimates for that task (assuming it happens again later in the project) so that you know you’ve got enough time to carry it out when it is scheduled again. You can do the same thing with an individual’s performance. While someone may be able to complete their task in the allotted time, another resource may take longer than scheduled. Manage your resources with the help of your schedule and flex the time per task depending on the skills and experience of who is carrying it out.
You can also use the plan to help you carry out a post-implementation review. Check your actual progress against the baseline for your plan to help see where the project suffered from changes to the scope or timescales.
Do you know more benefits of project plans? We like to hear your thoughts.