Project Plan Best Practices

Five best practices for building a great project plan that will remain useful throughout the execution and closing phases of your project.

• ensuring careful review of project deliverables

• championing your plan

• staying curious

• giving yourself time to plan

• recognizing and planning for the inevitable (things will go wrong)

When a project enters the ________ phase, your plans become more granular. In your plan, you need to break information down further. If you're creating a new website for a service, you'll need to break that deliverable down into smaller milestones

• initiation

• planning

_______ will break down into smaller tasks, like mocking up a design of a new website and developing a landing page.

• Milestones

• Goals

Each ________ will be assigned to a teammate and given a start and end date.

• milesonte

• task

Break down every __________ into milestones and tasks to ensure that you and you team have a clear picture of what need to be done to meet your project's goals.

• deliverable

• role

Your plan revolves around completing each and every tiny ________ ,

so you should take your time to get this piece right.

• deliverable

• task

There's a reason that planning is its own phase of the project _____ _____. It's a time-intensive process, especially for larger projects with multiple deliverables.

• planning cycle

• life cycle

Planning gives you and your team some time to think realistically

about what your team can and cannot accomplish within a certain time frame.

• True

• False

Strategies like effort estimation and capacity planning, help you and your team get a realistic sense of how long the project will take and when you'll be able to hit your milestones. It's also important to allow for _______ time, since projects rarely go exactly as planned.

• extra

• buffer

Later in the project, you'll be grateful that you initially planned for some built-in ________ around timing.

• flexibility

• buffers