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Developing the Project Plan

To begin the process of planning the project, it is necessary to gather as much information concerning the new project as you can. Because projects are not exactly the same time after time, you can get information from other projects that will at least give you guidelines to follow. These guidelines will not be plans that you can follow exactly because there are by definition differences between projects. But other plans used in the past can be valuable if you use them with the caveat that your project is not the same as what you are examining.

The first place to go for information is other project managers who have planned and executed projects like the one you are about to undertake. This is particularly true if these project managers are also PMPs. I have had many good conversations with other project managers about projects I was about to undertake, and I know that I saved a great deal of time by using other PMPs as a resource. If nothing else, I get a sounding board for my planning and also experience with a similar project. Ideas and tasks almost always come up that I had not thought about in any depth or at all. There is nothing quite like a conversation with another project manager about risks he or she overcame during the execution of his or her project.

You may also be able to find databases of formally recorded information. This information can include how the estimating was done as well as how the project was executed against its original baseline. Any information that has been kept on former projects can be very useful to you as you plan and execute yours.

A very valuable addition to your information can be the WBS of a previous project. These can be very helpful in defining tasks and sequencing. One of the problems with looking at a previous project's WBS, though, is the trap of using the numbers in the WBS you are examining. These were probably different people in a different time setting who almost certainly had deliverables other than those that your project has now.