A project plan is about crammed delivered deadlines. You have a project to manage. Where do you start? How do you know what to prioritise? Should you even be doing the project in the first place? INSITE offers a Project Planning and Management Course. This is a practical how-to focus. It starts with deciding if you should do the project. Then planning how to plan the project. Then planning and submitting the project. Finally managing the project after implementation. Have a look at our process flows that depict these four stages.
Decide to Do the Project
Why get yourself to manage a crammed delivered deadline? Especially if you don’t have to? A customer (or client) will approach you with a request or offer to do a project. The client could be another department in your organisation. Or it could be an independent private company, like a funder. Or it could be a government department. There’s usually money attached to the request or offer. Revenue is attractive. It’s one of the reasons to consider doing projects. But it’s not the only one. INSITE’s Project Planning and Project Management course helps you decide. You will have to answer the following key questions. What exactly does your client want? How much of it does your client want? What quality of product does your client want (just a “Volkswagen” or a “Mercedes”)?Who will constitute your team? Do they have the required expertise? Below is a flow chart. It shows the processes you need to go through making this decision.
Plan Project
So after all the above procedures you decide to go for the project. Now you have to plan how to divide up the work to develop your technical and financial proposals. How will you manage the team? Do the team members understand that process? Have they agreed to it? Have they signed agreements that set out their rights and responsibilities? Are they committed to assisting with developing the plan? (If not you will end up working overtime to do the plan yourself – if there is a tight deadline you will probably not sleep for several nights ….). Below is a flow chart of the process through which you need to divide up the work. And develop a collective understanding of the team. So that there will not be later misunderstandings.
Develop the Project Plan
If your team is on board then you go to the next phase, which is to develop the project plan. You and your team need to clarify the following. A detailed explanation of the deliverables that the client requires. You need to spell out what you have excluded. (This will save you later on, if your client continues to discover extra expectations….) You will clarify all the work items to achieve each of the deliverables. Divide up time for each team member to put this work in place. Calculate the total cost of their professional time. Calculate the cost of travel, accommodation and refreshments. Complete procurement documents and CVs…….
Manage the Project Plan
If your client accepts your proposals you will have a project. If this is a public sector client you will be bidding in competition against other bidders. You will have a very clear and detailed project plan. You know when you will deliver what. And how you will do it. To the last hour. So you have to manage your project plan. In this way you will also manage client expectations. The following flow chart shows you how and with what tools you do that, and shows where to apply these in the process.
INSITE’s Project Planning and Project Management course gets you practising the activities of each function in the above diagram. You use specific documents to make decisions at key points. This drives the processes.
The course consist of five modules. You can view the course details.
We deliver the course in two formats. We provide eight two-hour webinars sessions to South African and overseas participants. We also run two-day class courses in South Africa.
For more information, please contact us by phone, email or through the form on our contact page.
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