Last time I posted I gave some tips on getting the project initiated well. That leads us into some tips on planning. In my opinion, initiation isn’t complete until the plan is signed off. It seems that one of the lessons project managers take some time to learn is that phases aren’t usually cut and dried. You learn something every step along the way that opens up questions about the step before.
This isn’t a failure of the methodology; it’s reality.
To get your plan underway, you need a good understanding of the goals and objectives and you need to have discussed the scope with your sponsor. When you get together with your planning team, you will uncover more scope and find a few more goals that seem to make sense.
The trick to creating a Work Breakdown Structure in a planning session is to let them get chaotic so people are bringing up ideas. Brainstorming is the time to let people think about what they need to think about. When it gets a bit quiet, you can start to corral the energy into organizing the chaos: grouping the work ideas, clarifying duplicates and asking if there is anything else that needs to be considered.
I like to end the meeting there. You have enough to put together your first work breakdown structure. You will need to add the estimates and assign owners and organize the work in logical order. But, first pull it into something people can understand. Organize all the ideas of what work needs to be done into a list of tasks. Do what you can to put them together in groups or phases. Identify items that change the scope or the goals. Meet with your sponsor and get the decisions you need on the new items.
Then take a breath.
The next steps are all about validating the plan. In the next posts we’ll talk about validating the content of your work breakdown structure, turning it into a schedule with estimates and dependencies and knowing when it’s good enough to get going on execution.
The answer to the question in the title?
For this stage, enough is when your WBS looks like it at least touches on every aspect of your project.
Happy PMing
Perry