The importance of project plan Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

The importance of project plan - Essay Example Planning a project involves the final project and all the support activities that assist in accomplishing the finished work. It also includes all the engineering, acquisition work and the management processes of the project. Any documentation and technical or non technical exchange of knowledge with the contractors also form part of the planning stage. Planning of any project also involves the cost estimates of the tools, facilities, consultancy, labor and interproject coordination that are involved while carrying out the project. Scheduling of a project involves identifying the internal dependencies and other external dependencies with a view of finding out how the sequence of events will follow in the completion of the project. It also involves identifying any constraints so that a project manager is able to give a window for unforeseen events. Scheduling can be done through using the Critical Path Analysis and the Gantt charts. Good and proper administrative work assist also in keeping records which can be used for future reference, they can act as tools for evaluation and a very effective way of communication. Any project manager must be able to do a documentation of the resources that they are using such as the schedule, quality, resources and the cost documentation of the whole project. A schedule document is a document that entails all the activities of the project as they are undertaken, when they should start and when they are expected to end. This information is usually represented in form of networ k diagrams; bar charts and tabular reports. Such kind of charts includes the Critical Path Analysis charts and the Gantt charts (Tinnirello 2000, 42). Cost documentation should also be undertaken to find out the cost effectiveness of a project .It involves documenting the actual expenses against the planned expenses in form of table up to a given point of the project. An S- curve is also normally drawn and it usually shows the differences in the actual expenditure and planned expenditure of the project. Quality documentation is also an important aspect of any project management. It deals with checking the quality of the work whether the work meets the set specifications or the customers set standards. The quality of work is normally reflected in form of diagrams, charts and matrices. The charts show the past and future performances of the work done .Other diagrams that are used include the Pareto, line and scatter graphs and these diagrams are normally show errors as they have occurred. Resource documentation refers to assigning and usage facilities, tools and supplies made .The usage of organizational charts and resource reports are used by the project managers to identify how they are being used. A project manger must be able to allocate and schedule tasks at the same time and where there are more resources than required, then the tasks must be scheduled. Resource leveling is a methodology that is used for rescheduling thus reducing potential conflicts. Quality Standards Quality refers to the ability of a project to conform to the set specifications or whether the project meets the standards set by the customer. Conformance means that control measures in developing a project must be put into place so that