The project management plan

The project management plan is often confused with the schedule. The schedule answers “what and when”; the management plan answers “how we will run the project”: how decisions are made, how dates are controlled, what happens to risks and changes. A good plan is short: people read it rather than file it away.

What the plan contains

1. Goal and scope

• The goal and measurable success criteria.
• What is in the project and what is not.
• The key deliverables handed to the customer.

This part usually comes from the project charter.

2. Work breakdown and schedule

• The work breakdown structure — exactly what has to be done.
• A schedule with dependencies and milestones — usually a Gantt chart.
• The baseline: which dates are approved and how they may change.

3. Team and responsibilities

• Roles: sponsor, project manager, workstream owners.
• A responsibility matrix (RACI) for the key deliverables.
• Who can make which decisions.

4. Risks

• How risks are identified and rated.
• Probability and impact scales.
• How often the risk register is reviewed and what happens to red-zone risks.

5. Communication

• Regular meetings: which, with whom, how often.
• Reports: what a status report contains, who gets it, how often.
• Where documents, decisions and open issues are kept.

6. Change control

• Who can propose a change.
• How its effect on date, budget and scope is assessed.
• Who approves it and when the baseline changes.

7. Schedule and quality control

• How variance is measured: by task, milestone and project. See “Baseline and forecast”.
• What counts as “at risk” and what as “overdue”.
• Acceptance criteria for deliverables.

8. Closure

• How the result is accepted.
• What is handed over to operations.
• When the retrospective takes place and where lessons are kept.

How to make the plan useful

• One or two pages per section at most. If a section doesn’t fit, move the details to a separate document.
• Links, not copies. The schedule and risk register live in a system and the plan links to them — copies go stale within a week.
• Get it approved. A plan signed off by the sponsor is an agreement you can go back to in a dispute.
• Review it at phase boundaries. The plan changes with the project.

Common mistakes

• The plan is written as a formality and doesn’t answer “what do we do if…”.
• Dates and risks are copied into the document and never updated.
• There is no change procedure — and scope grows unnoticed.

Where to run it

In Etapero the living parts of the plan — the work breakdown, the schedule with its baseline, the risk register and open issues — are kept in the system rather than in copies, so the plan always shows the current state.