Communication helps you build and understand what your project is. Planning will help ensure that you can build that project.
Understand the scope of the project – This lets you know where your end goal is going to be.
Involve Stakeholders – Let them help identify priorities of features, potential deadlines, and even constants of the project. You may need to negotiate some here as things change or to be realistic.
Recognize that Planning is Iterative – Things are likely to change, and need to be updated as your work through a project.
Estimate based upon what you know – effort, duration, cost – can only be estimated based upon what you know. These values may change based upon updates to the plan.
Consider Risk as you Plan – Can you build contingencies into the plan?
Be realistic
Adjust Granularity – Higher granularity has lots of details. Low granularity has only basic ideas and concepts. The parts you are working on now, and will be soon, should have a high amount of granularity.
Define how you will ensure quality – Quality is a relative term, how will you ensure you are working toward the right definition?
Define how you will accommodate change – change is inevitable. You need to define a process on how stakeholders can request a change.
Track the plan frequently and adjust as needed – when you see slippage, or problems, adjust so you can fix.
Planning Principles was originally found on Access 2 Learn
