Project Planning

Key Deliverable: You need to create an Project Plan for your PEF Project, and share it with your Senior Education Officer.

Once your Improvement Plan has been submitted, you'll then proceed to the second stage of planning your project.

To assist in this process, you'll need to use the Project Planning document. You can find a link to the document here.

This page will walk you through each step of completing the Project Planning document.

Once completed, you will then move to the reporting and delivery phase of your project. During this time, the Project Plan will become your guide for delivering your project. You can find out more about reporting in the 'reporting' section of this site.

The Project Plan has five key areas:

Project Information
Progress (Gantt) chart
Budget
Communications
Risks

1. Project Information

In this section, you will detail the facts about your project:

Establishment Name: State whether this is a a single establishment, a Local Learning Community or a group of establishments working on this project.
Project Title: State the title of the project - this should be a simple title to identify the main work of the project.
Project Description: A brief description of what the project will achieve, and how it will achieve it.
Project Lead: The name of the person taking the lead role in managing the delivery of the project.
Link to Improvement Planning document: A hyperlink to the accompanying Improvement Plan document that was produced prior to proceeding to this stage of development.

Once added, this basic information about the project need not change throughout the duration of the project.

2. Progress (Gantt) Chart

The Progress Chart gives a pictorial view of the work that will be delivered by the project.

Actions and Milestones

In the first column, you will list the actions you will take in your project. For ease, these can be grouped into activities or 'phases'.

For example, the first phase in your project may be research or baseline intelligence gathering. In this phase, there may be a number of actions you take - research intervention, draft survey, approve survey, deploy survey, analyse survey results. Each of these would take their own line in the progress chart.

Some actions are more significant than others. These actions are called 'milestones'. For example, to end the first phase of your project, you may wish to publicise the results of a survey. In which case, the action 'publish survey results' could be seen as a milestone, as it is more significant that other actions in that phase.

In subsequent columns, you can give an indication of when this work will be undertaken. Each column covers the period of one week, so you can detail when you expect activity to take place.

Timing

Think carefully about sequencing - you can't start to use a service until you have bought it, and you can't buy a service before you order it.

Think carefully about dependencies - if you plan to deliver a piece of work for which you need to recruit a member of staff, then you can't start delivery of the piece of work until the member of staff is in place.

Visual Key

To help you track progress of the project, the progress chart becomes a live tool, that you keep up to date during the running of your project. At the start, all of the actions in your chart will be coloured 'pink', as they are 'planned'. As you progress, they will change colour:

amber - in progress
green - complete
red - overdue

This allows you to keep track of your project simply by looking at the colour or 'health' of your progress chart.

3. Budget

The budget sheet provides you with a simple to use location to keep track of the spend of your project. All that is required of you to track here is:

Item: a description or identifier of the spend
Unit Cost: the cost of the item individually
Total Cost: the aggregated cost of the individual items
Balance: the remaining balance of the project spend

4. Communications

The communications plan allows you to keep track of what groups and individuals you will need to keep informed of your project, what messages you will need to communicate, how often, and using what medium or 'channel'.

There are four columns to track on this sheet:

Stakeholder: either individuals or groups, who do you need to keep informed about your project?
Key messages: what do they need to know?
Frequency: how often do you need to tell them?
Channel: how are you going to tell them?

5. Risks

Risk is your friend.

Good project management has you consider at the beginning of every project the things that could potentially derail your project, and what action you can take to prevent these risks from occurring. Good risk management during a project has you considering the impact of risk on your project, and what you can do to ensure the risks do not get in the way of you delivering your project.

The risk register section of the project plan has a number of key areas for you to consider and keep up to date during the running of your project.

These are:

Risk: a title for the risk you are tracking.
Risk Description: a brief description of the risk to your project.
Inherent Profile: were you to do nothing, what would the effect of the risk be on your project?
- Likelihood: how likely is it that the risk will occur? This is given as 'low', 'medium' or 'high'.
- Impact: what would the impact be on the project? This is given as 'low', 'medium' or 'high'.
Mitigating Actions: What are the actions you need or could take to prevent the risk from affecting your project?
Residual Profile: Were you to put these mitigating actions in place, what would the effect of the risk be now on your project?
- Likelihood: how likely is it that the risk will occur now? This is given as 'low', 'medium' or 'high'.
- Impact: what would the impact be now on the project? This is given as 'low', 'medium' or 'high'.

Identifying Risks

Your first task is to identify the risks that could derail your project. Some of these may be external to the project - for example, you may be looking to recruit staff to deliver your project, but you already know that recruitment is a challenge. Some risks may be internal to your project - for example, delivering phase two of your project requires the completion of phase one.

Inherent Profile

Having identified your risks, you need to consider what is called the 'Inherent Profile' - if you did nothing, how likely is it that the risk will occur? What would be the impact on the project if the risk were to occur?

Mitigating Actions

Having identified the risks and thought about the impact they would have on your project, you now turn your attention to the actions that you could take that would prevent the risk from derailing your project. These are called 'mitigating actions'. Some of these will form actions in the delivery of your project. Some of them you will keep in reserve, should you need to use them at some point in the running of your project.

Residual Profile

Having now considered the actions you could take, you now need to consider what is called the 'Residual Profile' - having put these actions in place, how likely now is it that the risk will occur? What would be the impact now on the project if the risk were to occur?

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