Integrated planning

In creating the PBS, you can start to identify which of the products is most meaningful to you and over which you’d like to, or need to, exert greater control. Perhaps those that have a significant impact on the sponsor’s benefits position, or maybe those that relate to your critical success factors, or possibly the ones with significant risks attached. These and their sub-products in the PBS become potential milestones and checkpoints to you. Regardless of how the schedule flexes these items of ‘scope’ remain your North Star and if this is a time-critical project the ‘window’ in which they deliver may be an important control consideration for you too.

Once clear what it is that we have got to bring into existence, the next big question is how will we go about achieving this? This is the origination of the work breakdown structure (WBS) which identifies which tasks will give rise to which products and which groupings and sequences of which tasks depend on one another and how they relate. Again, it is obvious, when you think about it, that you cannot conceive a WBS until you have, at least a rudimentary, PBS.

Sharing a detailed understanding of the relevance, significance, and latitude for float of the various tasks and their dependencies among the team is a great way of building and sharing clarity of purpose and motivation and this stage of the planning process is often amongst the most revealing. Our second perspective on the plan is therefore the WBS.

Again, it is most usually the case that we can’t bid for resource until we know what skill types are required, in what quantity and at what periods in time. So, until the WBS is stabilised we don’t know, in detail, how our organisational breakdown structure (OBS) should look. The estimates of effort, developed against each task in the WBS must be translated into durations of tasks to develop a clear OBS against which to secure the necessary resources. As with the previous two process steps, during this stage of integrated planning we will be making numerous assumptions, testing the limits of the constraints, and identifying potential risks and hazards. These should all be recorded in the appropriate registers as it is this valuable output that provides a significant degree of control across the project and without the necessity for, or exclusive dependence on, the schedule.

Equally it isn’t until this third stage of the process that you derive a reliable view against which to allocate costs and their spend profiles. Whilst you might have been able to identify significant items of capital expenditure for some of the primary deliverables in the first stage, until you understand your OBS and when you will need to access resources you can’t infer period-on-period expenditures. So, about the point at which you understand all the products, processes, resources, and risks that you propose to manage is the point at which you can start to finalise your cost breakdown structure (CBS) itemising all cash requirements and expenditures along with a first view of when the costs will arise – although the full view won’t be available until scheduling is completed with all risks and constraints factored in. The CBS can clearly be looked at from either a product, process, or resource perspective; but interestingly, each different perspective will give you a different cost. This is because of variations in estimating and assumption making, some of the value of this integrated approach is that it allows the examination and contrast of such variations in the perspectives to provide a richer overall picture within a frame of more realistic expectations.

The final perspective to derive, prior to creating the schedule, is that of risk. The logs of assumptions, constraints and risks will have been growing through the previous three stages but now it is time to turn our attention to project specific risks. Because the plan is a hypothetical view of the future it is fraught with uncertainty and contingent events which depend on how the world actually ‘pans out.’ Thinking through all these options, angles and alternative approaches and their consequences is precisely what risk management is about; ‘what will we do if this happens? Or if that doesn’t occur as expected?’ are the very questions that risk planning is addressing. In the next blog we will look at change capable planning and why it is so important, but it is that proper planning processes force us through this chain of thought that Eisenhower styled as ‘indispensable.’ As you examine each of the first four stages of the planning process outlined above you are forced to think about what else could or might happen and what you would do about it – this is of huge value.

Only when you have a view of these four aspects is it sensible to try and create a schedule and apply the milestones and tasks to the timeline that will, most likely, be your primary control document. But the value of this integrated planning approach isn’t simply that it provides you with a richer picture and better framed expectations of how the project can safely proceed. It can, and should, also be used to immerse the team in the process of generating the plan; this gives a clarity of understanding and engagement with the project that it is hard to achieve as simply and constructively through any other process.

So, a frequently asked question is what, if the plan isn’t the Gantt chart, does the plan look like? The answer is both easy (it’s a suite of different documents) and elusive (it’s what you need it to be). The suite of documents will likely, at a minimum, include the PBS, the WBS, the dependency network, an OBS, a RAID log (or whatever your organisational acronym is for the control documents covering, risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies) and the schedule. It might, optionally, also include a stakeholder engagement and communications plan, special and specific governance arrangements and dispensations and any other artefacts that have been brought about by consideration of multiple situations and contingent responses to them.

Following the simple process of products first, processes second, resources third and, inter-alia, risks, assumptions dependencies and constraints, takes us through the journey to creating the consolidated plan which culminates in a sound schedule and the most appropriate monitoring and control points.

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