Project success begins with careful planning. Whether you are leading a complex initiative or managing your first small project, a strong project plan is your foundation. It transforms high-level goals into clear, actionable steps, keeps your team aligned, and helps you avoid costly surprises along the way.
In this guide, you will learn how to plan a project from start to finish. We will walk through every essential step, from gathering key information and choosing the right team to selecting an appropriate methodology and getting stakeholder approval. This is a practical, straightforward approach that will help you build a plan that works and set your project up for long-term success.
What is a project plan?
A project plan is a blueprint of a project, meticulously outlining the who, what, when, and how of bringing a project from concept to completion. It is a formal document that defines the project scope, objectives, resources, and all the necessary steps to achieve the project’s goals. This comprehensive guide serves not only as a roadmap for project execution but also as a tool for communication among stakeholders, ensuring everyone involved has a clear understanding of their roles, responsibilities, and the project timeline.
Why is project planning important?
Project planning is an indispensable phase within the entire project cycle, which typically includes initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and closure. Project planning is where the project’s vision is transformed into a structured action plan, detailing every task, resource, and timeline needed to achieve the project goals. Effective planning serves as the project’s backbone, helping managers and teams to anticipate potential challenges and devise solutions proactively. With a well-prepared project plan, you can:
- Ensure that every member understands their role, responsibilities, and the expectations placed upon them.
- Facilitate better decision-making, as stakeholders have a comprehensive overview of the project, its scope, and its constraints.
- Anticipate and mitigate risks by identifying potential challenges and uncertainties early on and planning appropriate strategies to address them.
- Optimize resource allocation, ensuring that resources are utilized efficiently throughout the project, from manpower to materials and budget.
- Maintain project scope, preventing scope creep by clearly defining project boundaries and deliverables from the outset.
What to include in your project plan
Before assigning tasks or building a schedule, it‘s important to know what goes into a complete project plan. A project plan is more than a list of deadlines. It is a strategic blueprint that keeps your team aligned, your goals focused, and your risks under control. Here are the ten key components every successful project plan should include:
1. Project overview
Start with a high-level summary that explains what the project is, why it matters, and what it aims to achieve. This overview provides essential context by outlining the purpose, main objectives, and the value the project is expected to deliver.
2. Scope and deliverables
Define what the project will produce and where its boundaries lie. Clearly stating what‘s included – and what isn‘t – helps manage expectations, prevent misunderstandings, and reduce the risk of scope creep.
3. Timeline and milestones
Map out a clear schedule showing when major tasks, phases, and deliverables are expected to start and finish. Including key milestones makes it easier to track progress and keep the team aligned on critical deadlines.
4. Roles and responsibilities
Clarify who is responsible for each task, decision, and outcome. When roles are clearly defined, accountability improves, and collaboration across the team becomes more efficient.
5. Budget and resources
Estimate the people, time, funding, and tools required to complete the project successfully. A well-planned budget and resource breakdown help you stay on track financially and operationally.
6. Risk management
Identify potential risks and plan how to avoid or respond to them. Mitigation strategies and contingency plans will help you handle unexpected issues without derailing the project.
7. Communication plan
Establish how project updates, decisions, and progress will be shared. Define the communication methods, channels, and frequency to keep everyone informed and aligned throughout the project lifecycle.
8. Quality standards
Set the criteria for what success looks like. Outline the processes, standards, and checkpoints that will ensure project deliverables meet expectations and maintain quality.
9. Change control process
Explain how changes to scope, budget, or timeline will be handled. Having a clear change control process helps manage updates in a structured, controlled, and documented way.
10. Approval process
Describe how and when project approvals will be obtained. Identify the stakeholders involved and the key decision points to ensure smooth progress through each phase of the project.
7 project planning steps
Whether you’re managing your first project or your fiftieth, knowing how to plan it properly is critical to success. This section breaks the process into seven clear and manageable steps. Follow them to build a strong foundation, align your team, streamline your workflow, and improve your chances of delivering the project on time and within scope.
Step 1: How to prepare your project team
Identify the areas touched by the project and invite people to the planning meeting who represent those areas. These will not be individuals who will be directly working on the project, but they manage the departments that will.
For example, if a publisher is planning a project for a book launch, think about who needs to be informed: the marketing team, the events team, the printing house, the media representatives, etc. This is important because these are the people who will know what work their respective departments will need to complete. They will need to know that you will be requiring resources from them to complete the project.
Step 2: Building a planning team and creating the WBS
While initial preparation starts with department heads, they are not the ones who will help plan the project in detail. The project planning team should include individuals who will be directly involved in the work. Their role is to help the project manager break the project down into specific components. Invite people who currently hold the task-based roles required for the project.
For example, a sales manager may not be helpful unless they are also handling day-to-day sales tasks. In that case, it’s better to involve a sales representative.
Once the planning team is in place, schedule a meeting to create the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The WBS represents the full scope of project work. It is not a schedule, but it provides the foundation for building one. You will use the outputs from this session to define tasks, estimate timelines, and assign resources in the next planning steps.
Step 3: How to create a work breakdown structure (WBS)
One of the advantages of creating the WBS is its brainstorming, nonlinear approach. By using this method, new ideas will pop into your mind, or the team‘s mind, and you‘ll have a complete understanding of the work.
- Begin the meeting with an explanation of the scope and objective of the meeting.
- Ask them to sit for 10 minutes and write all the different things they need to do on sticky notes. Have them think in terms of noun/verb formats, e.g. create a document, build a prototype, or test a program. Doing the first round of brainstorming individually allows them to think from their expertise.
- Then, ask them to place the notes on a blank wall.
- Review what is on the wall and add to it. If you have a team, you can ask them to go up as a group and review the information and add notes where they think it‘s needed.
- Have your team organize the work by what they think is logical. You‘ll end up with clusters of work on the wall.
At this point, you can end the project planning meeting. As the project manager, you‘ll want to validate that the groupings make sense to you since you have to manage the schedule. Your WBS may look different, but here‘s the language around the levels.
- The first level is usually the project name.
- The second level is usually main phases.
Any box without a sub box is a work package. That means someone is doing the work, all of the work packages add up to the phases.
Review the WBS
Compare your WBS to the project scope to ensure all key work is included and aligned with the intended outcome. If you spot new tasks or risks, bring them to the sponsor for approval. Also review the WBS against the schedule and critical path to confirm timelines are realistic and the project is still viable.
Step 4: How to estimate time and effort in a project
Accurately estimating time is one of the hardest things to do when planning your project. Time estimates help determine a large portion of the budget. There are two variable to take into consideration: Effort & Duration. Effort is what time the work would take if there were no interruptions and no other priorities. If you have to write an email it might take 5 minutes of effort. But if someone calls in the middle of it, then you have to go to a meeting, and then someone needs a decision...This means that the duration of writing the email could be 3 hours or all day. Think about how you estimate your own work. Do you underestimate? Overestimate? Do you come in pretty close? The truth is, you will never achieve 100% accuracy. No matter how good the plan is, things will happen along the way. You are trying to find the best estimate, not a guarantee.
Why care about the hours?
Some project managers tend to dismiss the importance of accurate time estimates. They think “hey, there’s no way I can get it right, so why bother?”, whereas others think “instead of wasting time creating estimates, I might as well get started on the project and finish it that much quicker.” Based on our experience, both of these approaches are wrong and they ignore the main benefits of proper time estimation:
- If you’re dealing with external clients, accurate estimation helps with inspiring confidence and the likelihood of repeat business.
- When you have to bill by the hour, accurate time estimates make it easier for you to account for each hour you or your team spent working on the project, as it will show you what kind of a final figure to expect and give you the opportunity to investigate the discrepancy.
- Better time estimation will also allow you to be more efficient in your projects: if you can more accurately judge how long each task is going to take, you can setup your structure accordingly to minimize inefficiencies. No more team members idly twiddling their thumbs, or being overwhelmed by too much to do at once!
The benefits of accurate time estimates go beyond better planning. When your estimates consistently prove reliable, it builds trust with stakeholders and helps your team feel confident in the workload they‘re assigned. One common mistake is using time blocks that are too large to be useful. For example, “Create marketing plan: 24 hours” is too vague. It may work for payroll but offers little value for planning or tracking. Breaking it down into smaller tasks provides clearer expectations and more accurate forecasting.
Learn more:
Top 5 Practices to Improve Your Team Time Estimates
How to Estimate Project Time and Resources
Step 5: How to create a project schedule and Gantt chart
Creating the schedule involves talking to your team members, getting their ideas on what work needs to be done first, how long it will take them and asking again if there is anything missing. Your best approach here is to talk to the people who will do the work since they know the most about how long it will take. There are a lot of techniques to gather an estimate of the time it takes to do a project task, but you only need to know enough about it to feel confident that the timeline is accurate.
Resource Planning
The question that remains before you schedule your project, is how will you get the right team members to be available for the exact timeline that you need? Birdview has a built-in resource loading simulator. This feature allows you to:
- Put together a project team based on skills and availability
- Check resource availability
- Ensure that there are no conflicts with existing project schedules before scheduling your new project
Validate the schedule
Once the project schedule is ready, typically visualized as a Gantt chart with task durations and dependencies, take time to review it carefully. Check that all planned work aligns with the approved scope, and confirm any new items with your sponsor before moving ahead.
Before final approval, bring the schedule back to the team to verify that everything reflects their input. This step helps catch gaps between assumptions and reality. For example, the sales team might expect training to take one hour, while the training team has planned three separate sessions. Reviewing the full plan together makes it easier to surface and resolve these mismatches. When possible, gather key contributors in the same meeting to align expectations and avoid delays later on.
Example:
Use a Gantt chart to line up tasks like “Design logo,” “Approve design,” and “Print packaging” so nothing gets delayed last minute.
Learn more about Resource Planning:
The Ultimate Guide to Resource Management
6 Best Practices of Gantt Charts in Management
Step 6: Getting sponsor approval with confidence
When you have the project scheduled, the next step is to go back to your sponsor and get them to sign off on the plan. Once they do that, you are ready to execute.
The RACI Matrix
RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed. A RACI matrix is a chart that outlines the roles of each contributor to a particular task or deliverable. This chart can be useful because it is very clear on what is expected from everyone involved.
For example, a writer is responsible for writing a blog post, while the marketing manager is accountable for it. To write the post, the writer consults with the Sales team, and the VP of Marketing would like to be informed. This chart is useful for cross-departmental activities in large organizations.
Step 7: Risk management in project planning
The one thing we know for sure in life is that things can and will go wrong. Having this information embedded in our DNA would make it irresponsible to set up a contingency plan. Projects are no different; no matter how to plan a project, you can rarely get a perfect execution and outcome. Fortunately, there are things we can do about it. Risk management is an art and a science in the world of project planning because to be able to foresee problems, you need to have the insight and know when to react. Using project management software is a great risk mitigation tactic to start with because after you set up a project the way you anticipate, you‘ll be able to see the bigger picture and data points like dependencies, the critical path, budget, resources etc. Understanding the project planning steps and applying them effectively is essential for the success of any project. Each step in project planning lays the groundwork for the next, creating a clear path from the project’s inception to its completion.
What tools can you use to plan a project?
Selecting the right tools is crucial for ensuring your project’s planning phase is both effective and efficient. The variety of options ranges from basic spreadsheets to full-featured project management software, each catering to projects of different sizes, complexities, and industry-specific needs.
Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets, such as Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, stand as the backbone of project planning for many. Their flexibility allows for crafting customized timelines, budget estimations, and resource allocations. Despite lacking the advanced functionalities found in specialized project management applications, spreadsheets offer a familiar and accessible starting point for smaller projects or those constrained by budget limitations.
Dedicated planning software
When projects demand a more refined toolset, dedicated project planning software steps in. These platforms are built with project management at their core, featuring capabilities like Gantt charts for detailed timeline visualization, task dependencies, and tracking of progress. Such software suits projects that navigate complex schedules and interdependent tasks, offering a more granular project planning approach.
Comprehensive project management platforms
Platforms, such as Birdview, offer an all-in-one solution for project management, supporting a project through every phase of its lifecycle–from initiation to final delivery. Comprehensive project management platforms include planning features with resource management, time tracking, and team collaboration functionalities, presenting a unified system for overseeing projects regardless of their scale or complexity. These software are particularly beneficial for organizations aiming to consolidate their project management tools into a single, cohesive environment.
How project planning differs by industry
While the core principles of project planning are consistent, each industry has unique requirements, regulations, and challenges. Understanding these differences allows you to tailor your planning approach to fit the specific goals, risks, and constraints of the environment you‘re working in. Below is a breakdown of how planning essentials vary across five major industries.
Business Consulting
In Business Consulting, the project planning process is highly client-centric and adaptable. Projects often involve organizational change, strategy development, or process optimization. Key elements include:
- Stakeholder analysis. Understanding client needs, expectations, and the project’s impact on various stakeholders is crucial.
- Risk and opportunity assessment. Given the strategic nature of consulting projects, identifying potential risks and opportunities early in the project planning stage is essential for delivering value.
- Change management plans. Since these projects typically aim to alter existing business practices, planning for effective change management is critical.
Engineering
Engineering projects demand a high level of precision and technical detail. These projects often involve designing, testing, and implementing solutions or constructing physical structures. Distinct requirements include:
- Technical specifications. Detailed engineering drawings and specifications are fundamental to the planning process.
- Compliance and safety standards. Adhering to industry-specific safety and regulatory standards is mandatory.
- Resource allocation. Engineering projects require meticulous planning of resources, including materials, machinery, and specialized labor.
Information technology (IT)
In IT, projects range from app development to infrastructure or cybersecurity. Planning tends to be iterative and tech-driven. Key factors include:
- Agile methodology. Many IT projects benefit from agile planning processes, where the project scope and solutions evolve through collaborative efforts of self-organizing and cross-functional teams.
- Technology stack selection. Deciding on the technology stack is crucial early in the planning phase to ensure project feasibility and sustainability.
- Security protocols. With the increasing importance of data security, integrating security measures into the project plan is non-negotiable.
Civil engineering
Civil Engineering projects encompass the design, construction, and maintenance of infrastructure such as roads, bridges, and buildings. Key project planning elements include:
- Environmental impact assessments. Understanding and planning for the environmental impact of projects is essential.
- Permit and zoning requirements. Securing the necessary permits and ensuring compliance with local zoning laws are critical steps in the project planning phase.
- Material and labor logistics. Detailed logistics planning for materials and labor is crucial due to the scale and complexity of civil engineering projects.
Architecture
For Architecture projects, the planning process is deeply intertwined with design and aesthetics, alongside functionality and sustainability. Unique aspects include:
- Site analysis. A comprehensive analysis of the project site, considering factors like climate, terrain, and context, is essential.
- Regulatory compliance. Adhering to building codes and architectural standards is a critical part of the planning process.
- Stakeholder collaboration. Engaging with clients, contractors, and regulatory bodies early and throughout the planning and design process is key to ensuring that the project meets all expectations and requirements.
While project planning shares some common ground across industries, such as the need for clear objectives and risk management, the specifics can vary greatly. Tailoring the planning process to address the unique challenges and requirements of each industry ensures that projects are not only compliant but also set up for success from the start.
Free project plan templates
To ease the creation of a project management plan, we’ve compiled a collection of project planning templates across various professional service industries. These templates serve as comprehensive blueprints, detailing a series of steps and subtasks designed to steer any project to completion. Available for customization, these resources can be downloaded or accessed through Birdview, allowing for adjustments to fit the unique needs of your project.
Planning is not just a starting point. It is the key to successful project delivery. A well-structured project plan brings clarity, consistency, and coordination across your team.
With the right tools like Birdview PSA, you can streamline the entire planning process, save time, improve communication, and adapt seamlessly as your project evolves. Whether you are managing tasks, allocating resources, or tracking performance, Birdview gives you the visibility and control needed to deliver projects on time and with confidence.
Start your next project with a clear plan
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Learn more:
5 Steps of Project Risk Management
What is Strategic Planning in Project Management
Time management in project management: Strategies and Benefits
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the difference between a project plan and a project schedule?
A project plan is a comprehensive document that outlines the scope, goals, roles, risks, communication strategy, and more. A project schedule is a part of the plan that focuses specifically on task sequencing, durations, deadlines, and dependencies. It is often presented as a Gantt chart.
2. How do I estimate project duration accurately?
Start by identifying each task and estimating how much focused effort it requires. Then factor in potential delays, multitasking, and team availability. Talk to people who have completed similar tasks before and use past project data to improve your estimates.
3. When should I update the project plan?
You should update the project plan whenever there are significant changes to the scope, timeline, budget, or roles. It is also helpful to revisit the plan at major milestones or after key risk reviews.
4. What should I include in a project plan?
A complete project plan includes objectives, scope, deliverables, timeline, roles and responsibilities, budget, communication strategy, risk management, quality criteria, change management process, and approval steps.
5. Which tools are best for project planning?
For smaller projects, spreadsheets like Excel or Google Sheets may be sufficient. For more complex projects, dedicated tools like Birdview PSA, Asana, or Smartsheet offer advanced features for scheduling, collaboration, and resource management.
