Business Project Planning
Business project planning is an important stage of any business project. Making best of it, it is necessary to make the detailed plan of what is expected to be done in order to get the needed result. Having all the necessary tools, such as the ConceptDraw PROJECT software, is essential nowadays for completing the tasks within projects on time and so to have things done by a deadline.
After the initiation stage, the planning one starts. The project should be well planned to an appropriate level of detail, so this stage becomes the successful business project planning one. The main purpose of it is to plan such constraints as cost, resources and time. It should be done adequately in order to estimate the needed work and so to effectively manage all risks during project execution. Unless the work on a project is adequately planned, it may reduce the project's chances of successfully accomplishing its objectives.
Project planning usually consists of determining the project management methodology that needs to be followed by all the participants involved in the project. By the way, all the mentioned participants should have the well-described roles, so they know what they are in charge for within a project.
Developing the scope statement, as well as quality assurance measures, is also important. Usually, the project manager is responsible for most of the work of business project planning but sometimes he or she involves other people from the defined project team to help them.
Selecting the planning team itself, as well as other resources, is another important part of the project manager’s role. Identifying deliverables, activities needed to complete them and networking these activities in their logical sequence, creating both work and product breakdown structures, estimating cost and time for activities, as well as developing the schedule and the budget, gaining formal approval to start work and do all the risk and other business project planning is included in the long list of most of the project managers’ responsibilities.
Such processes as planning for scope management and for communications, identifying responsibilities and roles and determining what exactly to purchase for a project, are also the project managers’ duty.
For those projects that include the new product development, the conceptual design of the operation of the final product may be performed with the project planning activities involved. It may help to inform the planning team while identifying all the necessary planning activities and deliverables.
A project plan may be also known as a work breakdown structure (WBS). It is created with similarities with a critical path but being worked backward from a completion date with each of the tasks starting the later the better.
Pic 1. Business Project Planning Software
Those resources that are assigned to each of the tasks and the plan itself should be resource leveled. The aggressive durations are recommended to be used. Mentioning all the necessary details on a baseline means getting it established on time and so getting an opportunity to monitor the project by using the ConceptDraw PROJECT software.
A business plan itself can be described as a formal statement of business goals. The reasons these goals are attainable may be also included in this description and plans for reaching them should be also mentioned at the business project planning stage. Adding background information about the organization itself, as well as the project team, may help to achieve a successful result.
The duration of each plan is always up to the circumstances the company is in including its personnel and whether the participants are qualified enough to do their job on time. In case the already existing business needs a major change, then a period of 3 to 5 year has to be mentioned as a business plan duration as this would be enough for investors to look for their investment return by that time.
Being the decision-making tool, a business plan’ content and format can be determined by both its objective and its audience. Thus, a business plan for a non-profit organization might discuss the fit between the organization’s mission and business plan itself. It is important to remember that a business plan for a bank loan may build a convincing case for the organization’s ability to repay the loan on time so such situation should be well planned and all the risks should be discussed in advance not to lead to any loss.
A business plan for a project that requires equity financing will need to explain why these particular resources, the upcoming growth opportunities, as well as the competitive advantages, will lead to a high exit valuation in the end. All should be properly planned in advance to avoid any abruptness at the stages followed by the planning one.
Preparing a business plan is an important business project planning activity that is common for a wide range of knowledge from many different business disciplines such as human resource management, finance, intellectual property management, operations management, marketing, supply chain management and others. It can be helpful to view the business plan as a collection of sub-plans, one for each of the main business disciplines if possible and it is always better to break the large tasks at any of the stages in project management into the smaller ones.
Getting ready for running a project, a project manager shall be ready for making the appropriate business project planning. It can be achieved by using the appropriate business project planning software, such as the ConceptDraw PROJECT one. Having the mentioned tool may lead to the needed result on time as it allows its users to easily share the information they need in order to co-operate for completing the tasks within each of the ongoing projects. And having a mutual multi-project resource pool available for all the ConceptDraw PROJECT users allows them to get all resources’ usage with maximum efficiency leading to a profitable result.
Getting involved in managing the projects, it becomes necessary to get a useful software that can help a project manager to arrange work within a project team. Choosing the ConceptDraw PROJECT software over other applications enables to complete the project tasks on time making it possible to achieve what was originally planned to.