Project Planning is one of the most important process in the life cycle of a project. A perfect planning can improve the chances of success of any kind of a project. During initiating process and beginning of planning process, it is important to find the answers to five W’s questions before moving to the “How” part of the project.
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1. What – This is the very first W which is very essential, it form the basis for scope definition. “What is the project all about and what is the outcome?” It is very important for the project manager to understand what is its business objective and expectation of critical stakeholders.
2. Why – Next comes “Why”, why is it required by the business, what is the criticality of the project, what is not happening without it or what different would happen after it. One “Why?” can answer all these questions. The manager must ask “Why are we doing this project?” question once or twice, to go really deep and understand the fundamental root benefits & motivations that are driving its existence. One should adopt the traditional performance improvement technique and ask “Why?” five times to ensure that all the doubts are clear before proceeding further.
3. Who – This is very critical “W” and the project manager must be very careful while listing down the names of all the key-stakeholders of the project. There should be some idea of the actual users of the project. Also it is important to identify all the stakeholders impacted directly or indirectly by the project. Incomplete stakeholder identification can lead to serious consequences including failure of the project. This also include who all are required to work as key resources of the project team? Depending on the nature of the project, the project manager can list down the skill set required and for what duration. If there is a need of any expertise which the company lack and needs to be hired or outsourced, then it is important to check for the process for procurement document with business justification for the same.
4. When – When is very important as in most of the cases the sales team commits unrealistic timelines to the client without consulting the project manager or the project sponsor. In such cases it is important for the project manager to understand its criticality. If it is not very critical then he can do his homework to negotiate on the timelines given to the project team. In the otherwise case he has to sit with his team to plan to deliver as per the committed timelines.
5. Where – The last “W” is where is the optimal location for the work to be performed and where will the outcome of the project be used? In case of distributed team, a proper planning to handle the work effectively, is required at very initial stage. This can save both time and cost later on.
After a thorough understanding and documenting the answer of five-What, why, when, who and where, the project manager’s focus shift to the question How? Thus ensuring that too much time is not spent on approach and methodologies, without first understanding the actual requirement and essence of project.
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