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In this guide:
Definition, examples, and project planning must-haves—plus the outline of the roadmap I’ve used for over 20 years to create clear, concise project plans that prioritize people and keep everyone aligned.
More resources about project planning:
- A list of 15 project plan templates to help you kickstart your project successfully
- The must-have elements of a project plan to help you align your team and stakeholders from the very beginning
- The nine crucial stages of an effective project planning process that makes each project run smoother than the last
- A rundown of the top 10 project planning tools to streamline your processes (and make your job easier)
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When people are at the center of your planning process, they become informed, engaged, and invested in the project’s success. Your team goes from being viewed as ‘mere resources’ to a cohesive, accountable unit that understands its impact on a project from the get-go.
And it all starts from the project plan.
What is a project plan?
A project plan is a fundamental document that outlines and illustrates how a project will operate from start to finish.
It is the backbone of any project, and can take different forms: a list, a Gantt chart, a Kanban board, or a live view of planned and tentative work in dedicated project planning software like Float (aka the people I‘m writing this guide with 👋).
Whether you’re planning for a website design or a trip to the moon, at the end of the project planning process you should be able to answer the following questions:
- What is the project process? How will tasks be completed, and what are the project stages?
- What are the project deliverables? What must be created, developed, or produced to complete the project?
- What tasks are required to deliver the project? What steps need to be taken, and in what order?
- Who is responsible or accountable for the work? Who will lead the project, manage the tasks, and ensure everything stays on track?
- When do stakeholders need to be involved in giving feedback or making decisions? How will their input be incorporated into the project plan?
- How will we handle task management? What resource planning or project management tool will be used?
By answering these essential questions, a project plan can set clear expectations for how the team will create, ship, and agree on deliverables, ultimately leading to a successful project.
Why you always need a project plan
Plans are critical to any project size, scope, or type because they can help you avoid:
🚩 Scope creep
🚩 Missed deadlines and cost overruns
🚩 Misaligned expectation
🚩 Unmotivated and stressed teams
🚩 Unhappy clients or stakeholders
🚩 Overbooked and unavailable team members
🚩 Lack of clarity around roles and responsibilities
🚩 Indecision over deliverables, strategy, and even resource allocation
🚩 Poor communication around the review and feedback of deliverables
🚩 Inability to schedule timely reviews, which leads to lost project time
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Plan and allocate resources effectively
With Float’s user-friendly interface and drag-and-drop functionality, you can easily create and update schedules, assign tasks, and track progress in real time.
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The benefits of effective project planning
To some, a project plan is a dry document that lists dates and tasks 😴 But it’s much more than that for someone invested in the project.
For key stakeholders, the project plan serves as the guiding document that directs how the team will meet project milestones, make decisions, and eventually complete the project within the boundaries of its scope.
Well-thought-out project plans:
• Keep projects profitable
• Provide a roadmap for the project
• Align with the project charter
• Help to identify and track project risks
• Map your scope and effort to a realistic timeline
• Outline roles, responsibilities, and resourcing requirements
• Keep your project on time and within budget
• Help to identify impacts due to project change
• Keep stakeholders informed of project progress
• Keep teams on task, within scope, and on budget
• Help to keep team members efficient and productive
• Allow for accurate reporting of progress
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Pro tip: ensure alignment with status reports and calls
A project plan alone may not effectively communicate all the details of a project. Consider using weekly project status reports and calls to ensure alignment throughout the project. A status report should include what work was completed the previous week, what is currently in progress, upcoming tasks and milestones, a to-do list and action items, an update on project completion and budget percentage, and any issues or risks that need addressing.
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7 steps to create a people-first project plan
While work breakdown structure, process, deliverables, and estimates are important, they are not the starting point for building a good project plan. Your team is.
Every team member brings a unique skillset, experience, and perspective to the table. Acknowledging this fact right at the beginning is vital to ensuring you leverage their strengths and optimize resources for the successful completion of the project.
The steps I always take:
1. Onboard the team
2. Identify stakeholders
3. Create a draft plan
4. Get feedback from your team on the draft plan
5. Create your finalized plan with a project planning tool
6. Review your plan for the last time
7. Ship the plan
1. Onboard the team
As you build your project team, you must ensure everyone on your team is aligned with the project’s goals and scope. Onboarding is an opportunity to start a dialogue about the project and how everyone can contribute to its success. One way to achieve this is through an internal kickoff meeting, where you discuss the project’s details, such as the scope, the work plan, and timeline.
This meeting can also serve as an opportunity for team members to ask questions, get to know each other better, and build rapport during the project planning phase.
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Pro tip: find the right people for the task in minutes
Float lets you store important information about your team, including their skills and strengths in the form of searchable tags. This can be a valuable resource when staffing future projects and facilitating better collaboration on the current project.
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To get the conversation started, ask some initial questions to get everyone stoked about the work:
- What makes our team unique, and why are we poised to succeed?
- What about the project gets you excited?
- Is there a specific deliverable or task you want to work on?
- How can we collaborate more effectively on the project?
- How will we communicate and stay aligned as a team?
- What can we do together to exceed stakeholder expectations?
2. Identify stakeholders
On some projects, you’ll work directly with one team member and not have to engage with scores of stakeholders across various departments, disciplines, and even companies. That’s the dream 🤩 but it definitely won’t always be the case.
When managing several project stakeholders, start by running a stakeholder mapping exercise and asking your point of contact or project sponsor to assign names and titles to each category. This exercise will ensure that everyone is on the same page and that there’s no ambiguity regarding roles and responsibilities.
Once stakeholders are mapped, conduct detailed interviews to gather insights into their needs, level of understanding of the project, communication preferences, and any potential risks.
Below are a few questions you should consider adding to your stakeholder interview script (in addition to some project-specific questions):
- What is your role on the project?
- Who is the final sign-off? Who owns the project?
- Have you discussed how you will collaborate and communicate as a team?
- What is your process for gathering and delivering feedback to us?
- What is the project’s due date? Is there a specific event or reason for that due date?
- Are there any dates when you or your team will not be available during the project?
- Will you want our team to present our work or progress to the larger organization at any point? When are those meetings?
- Have you worked on a project like this one in the past? If yes, are there any learnings we should apply to this project?
- Are there any risks with this project that we should be aware of?
- How do you prefer to be communicated with about project details?
- How much education should we do about our process and deliverables?
These conversations will uncover a ton of information for you to share with your team and apply to your project plan.
3. Create a draft plan
Create a draft plan using your scope or statement of work documents, which should outline specific deliverables or timing. Also, look back through your stakeholder interview notes, plus the data in your resource management tool. Are there any dates or timing constraints you need to account for? ⌛
A sketch of a project plan—i.e. putting pen to paper, even digitally—can help you shape your plans.
(If you’re still figuring out the details, tentative project plans in a tool like Float can help you see what needs to be done and when.)
Make sure you have the big picture thinking covered in your sketch. You’ll need the following:
- A general idea of the process: what are you delivering, and what workflow does your team generally use for project execution? Do you use formal project management methods like waterfall or scrum? Are there variables based on the project or team that will make you reconsider the process?
- An accounting of deliverables: list all deliverables that need to be created for the entire project. Think through the order in which they need to be delivered, which may depend on other milestones or deliverables. This will help you to pace the work in your plan.
- A solid understanding of the project team and their respective roles: identify who is doing what and how they’ll collaborate on the work. Consider how to employ their expertise to create, present, and sell the work to get it approved on time and within the scope. Use insights gained from onboarding conversations.
- A clear idea of the task budget and team resourcing: have a good idea of what work needs to happen and when. Look at task estimates and resourcing plans to avoid over-promising timeframes or overcommitting the team.
- A clear view of other project work: understand team resourcing plans to keep workloads balanced. Avoid assigning too much work to the team on a given day or week.
- A plan and scope for deliverable reviews, feedback, and approvals: consider the steps needed to present, collect feedback, and revise each deliverable. Ensure key stakeholders are involved in the process, and their feedback is incorporated into the plan.
- All key dates and due dates: check calendars on both sides of the fence (team and stakeholders). Account for holidays, closings, vacations, meetings, and any other possible date that could cause outages. Ensure that hard due dates are included in the plan. Communicate all key dates and due dates to the team and stakeholders.
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Pro tip: save time with project templates in Float
The ability to reuse project plan templates in Float is a game changer. With just a few clicks, you can create a new project plan from a template, saving time and ensuring consistency across your projects. Plus, the data from your plans can be easily turned into a report, providing valuable insights into your team's workload and project progress.
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4. Get feedback from your team on the draft plan
Schedule a planning meeting with the team to present your draft for feedback and input. It’s essential to encourage their input, as they will be more engaged in the plan if they have a say in its creation.
You want to get feedback on the following:
- Project phases: discuss the different steps of the project and what needs to be accomplished in each stage
- Project deliverables: review the list of deliverables and ensure everyone is clear on what is expected for each deliverable
- Due dates/timing: discuss timelines and due dates for the project and ensure that they are realistic and achievable
- Assignments: assign roles and responsibilities to team members and ensure everyone understands their role in the project
Present the initial plan in your project planning tool, and then open the floor to questions and suggestions. Encourage the team to give input and feedback on the plan by asking specific questions like:
- Are there better ways we can approach this project?
- Will the deliverables meet our needs and help stakeholders make informed decisions?
- When and who will review our work before client presentations?
- When will we collaborate and hand off work to ensure quality and consistency?
There are a few you can answer with a resource management tool, too:
- Do we know who’s responsible for what?
- Is anyone taking time off that we need to account for?
- Can we meet the due date with this plan?
If you’re looking for a little more direction on organizing this planning meeting, check out this sample planning meeting agenda 👇
5. Create your finalized plan with a project planning tool
Organize all the relevant information about your project in a way that’s easy to understand and navigate.
Break your project into phases
Think about what needs to be accomplished and how to reach your objectives. The phases in a website design project might include discovery, UX design, graphic design, front-end development, and back-end development.
Add deliverables and related tasks
It’s essential to account for every project task related to completing a deliverable to be realistic about timing.
For example, if your deliverable is a sitemap, some of the steps to create, present, and revise it may include creating sitemap v1, holding an internal review meeting, delivering sitemap v1 for stakeholder feedback, revising sitemap v1, delivering sitemap v2, and obtaining final approval.
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Pro tip: use a tool that cuts down on project complexity
Project and resource planning software helps you organize and visualize all the relevant project information. You can easily create a list view of phases and deliverables, breaking down your project into manageable tasks.
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Assign tasks to team members
Once you’ve listed all the work, it’s time to assign people to each task. This will help you connect your resourcing plan to your project plan and ensure you’re not working against any significant conflicts or obstacles 🛑
This is where a project planning tool with capacity management features like Float is critical. Unlike Gantt charts in a spreadsheet or project management software, Float shows your team’s capacity and allocations in real time, allowing you to see possible schedule conflicts and over- and under-allocation. The live view lets you make the best decisions on what to allocate to who and when.
Set start and end dates for each task
Once you commit task estimates to calendar time by plotting dates on your plan, you’ll begin to see your project come to life. You may notice that some of your original ideas break down because you hadn’t considered resourcing plans or the fact that you were planning for too much time on a task, putting the plan over the due date. It’s all good, though; there’s time to change what needs to be updated.
Add task dependencies to indicate the order of work
If you can’t start one task or phase before another is complete (common in the waterfall methodology), you should include it in your plan.
6. Review your plan for the last time
Our work is fast-paced, and sometimes it’s tough to get everyone’s attention 🏃 While the preference may be to call a quick, 30-minute meeting to review the final plan with the team, it’s not always possible or even advised.
If you can’t meet with the team to confirm the plan, consider sharing it async and ask them to review all of their tasks and timing and confirm with you before sharing it with clients.
And if you use a tool like Float, all team members can access the project when needed and give feedback.
After making any changes suggested by your team, you want to be sure the clients are aligned on the schedule and process and make them aware of when they are critical to the process. Be sure to cover the following:
- The overall project process and roles
- The steps taken to build consensus and gain alignment, along with the time required for the same
- The level of interaction needed from clients and the time required as per the plan, including stakeholders, decision-makers, and the number of days necessary for discussions and consolidated feedback
- The timeline, due date, and identification of any other initiatives, projects, or events that could impact the project
- Whether any key company events or outages have been missed
- Identification of any additional risks that clients should be aware of and an explanation that project risks will be tracked and discussed regularly in the weekly status report
- The communication plan to keep them informed and aligned on progress
7. Ship the plan
You’ve put a ton of work into drafting your plan, so taking the additional step to ensure everyone is on board with it should be important to you. Of course, you never want this process to take so much time that it delays any project work. If you’re stretched for time, you can create the plan while work is underway—but don’t let it go unconfirmed for too long. You want to be sure that you have an agreement because the details in your plan will dictate so much, including your immediate next steps.
As soon as you have agreement from the whole project team, you can confirm the plan 🚢
[fs-toc-omit]Your project plan is a living, breathing document
Your project plan is not a one-and-done document. Even after you’ve confirmed the plan, you must continue to manage it regularly.
When changes occur, communicate them transparently with your team and stakeholders. Be sure to call out any significant impacts on timing, scope, or resources. Document and share any changes through your regular project communication channels, such as status reports.
And as your plan changes, update the baseline so you can look back over time and see how the plan has shifted.
PS: if you’re looking for some extra guidance, download our free planning checklist and adapt it to your unique projects and team.
And remember: when people are at the center of your planning process, they become informed, engaged, and invested in the project’s success. It’s a win-fin for everybody involved.
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Better project planning with Float
Schedule tasks, monitor timelines, and track time and real-time capacity in Float to plan projects with confidence.
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FAQs
Some FAQs about project planning
Project planning is typically the responsibility of a project manager, who ensures that timelines, resources, and objectives are aligned. In some cases, resource managers or team leads also play a key role in coordinating resources and schedules.
1. Defining project scope, goals, and deliverables.
2. Breaking down tasks and assigning responsibilities to the right team members.
3. Creating realistic timelines with key milestones and due dates.
4. Allocating resources efficiently to avoid overbooking and ensure team availability.
5. Identifying and managing risks and stakeholder expectations through continuous communication and updates.
The best tools for project planning offer features like task scheduling, timeline creation, and resource management like Float (that’s us 👋). Dedicated project planning software that includes resource management allows for effective workload distribution, capacity tracking, and real-time adjustments, ensuring teams are not overbooked and projects stay on track.
