Summary

As Eisenhower said, “Plans are nothing, planning is everything”.

How your project plans to deliver its scope, the business outcomes and benefits is critical to whether you will achieve them. So, you need to focus on governing your project’s planning stage to ensure you achieve your goals.

This Guide is for all members of the Project Steering Committee and the Sponsor and is required from the outset of the project as it covers tasks that support the Project Set Up stage.

Our research into projects and why they do or don’t deliver value found that many projects go ‘off the (value) rails” at the planning stage. Despite the existence of the business case justifying the project, the business case is rarely used as the basis for the planning process — yet, it is to deliver your business case that your project is approved.

So, as a member of the governance team, you need to closely track and monitor your project’s planning processes to ensure that your project team is specifically planning to deliver, enable and support the desired business outcomes and benefits you’ve just signed up to!

And, with value delivery management, this requires a different way of thinking to the norm. You need to view every project is a change project. Therefore, your planning process needs to be based on a change-planning template (not, for example, on a system-delivery template). This may be strange to many project teams and will need your guidance to achieve.

But, our research found, that when you think and plan to deliver a project as a change project, the actual business value realized goes up exponentially — and that’s what you are accountable for! (See “How to plan change” available from project-sponsor.com to learn how change planning works.)

Your plans determine your workload, which determines your effort and therefore your cost. And all of these are based on your team’s ‘estimates’. Knowing how to assess and govern ‘estimates’ is critical to your success (and peace of mind).

Another dimension of the planning stage is the allocation of resources to the project. Second-rate teams tend to deliver second-rate results. Just hiring a bunch of consultants and handing the job to them does not work, you need to closely govern your consultant and contractor selection processes to get the right resources (when you need them).

As a member of the governance team you need to allocate, cajole, persuade, hijack or do whatever is necessary to get the right resources onto your project. Every project staffing compromise can directly compromise the project’s value.

In one of our governance training courses that we run for senior executives at MBA schools, we have given different teams of executives the same office design terms of reference and asked them to design the office as defined. Every team has designed a different solution to the same needs description. Who is on your project team will determine your result. This is a process (actually a set of processes) you need to govern carefully.

“How to govern project planning” ensures your project is planned and resourced to deliver the (business case’s) value and that your project’s subsequent progress is reported against a reliable and realistic base. It puts you in control of your project’s value delivery.

Benefits

This Guide ensures you

1. manage your project scope with a focus on ‘value realization’
2. focus on resourcing your project correctly and completely
3. understand the limitations of estimating and its impacts downstream
4. select the right (for you and the project) project manager
5. know what criteria are used to select any consultants and how they’ll be managed.

If you plan inadequately, you’ll never deliver a good outcome resulting in failure from the start.

Who should read

This Guide is designed to be read primarily by all those in project governance roles (Sponsor/Steering Committee) but the Guide is also useful for key Stakeholders, the PMO and Auditors to understand what should happen at the governance level at each stage of the project.

Contents

1. Understanding the end-to-end value delivery process
2. Understanding project planning
3. Understanding why project estimates are so often ‘wrong’
4. The end-to-end project planning process
5. How to govern your project’s ‘solution’ scope
6. How to select your project steering committee
7. How to select and appoint your project manager
8. How to agree ‘project handover requirements’
9. How to evaluate your project’s delivery approach and strategy
10. How to evaluate your project’s plans
11. How to govern your project team selection
12. How to govern consultant selection
13. How to monitor that the project planning stage has been finished.

In addition, we also provide you with some additional supporting tools and resources to make use of this Guide easy and effective.

Bonus

The perfect science ‘Hindsight’
A value delivery management article by Jed Simms describing the most common wishes of executives when they look back on their projects — so you can avoid them at the outset.