Project Planning Approach
Project planning helps us strategize a path to project success, allowing us to consider and plan for all of the factors that will impact our project, including the 5 Key Elements of Impactful Project Management: Scope, Stakeholders, Outcomes, Schedule, and Communications.
In mission-driven organizations, we can integrate planning for the 5 Key Elements and other factors into one project plan by following these five steps:
Define or confirm your project scope. Scope establishes our project's purpose and is critical to ensuring buy-in and engagement, so we want to get our scope nailed down as early as possible.
Identify your project stakeholders and define their roles. Stakeholder engagement is the foundation of projects in mission-driven organizations, so we want to consider and plan for engaging our stakeholders right away.
Plan for communication. Project success hinges on good communication, so plan early for how you will communicate about the project and gather feedback. Communication planning can happen in parallel with stakeholder planning.
Define your outcomes or deliverables. Clearly define what will be accomplished during the project. Once we've defined what our project outcomes will be, it's much easier to plan for other specific factors that will impact your project, like quality measures, budget, and resources. Outcomes planning also leads us to task planning, driving the actions of our project.
Set a schedule, creating deadlines and milestones that can be used to set expectations and monitor project progress.
This simple approach to project planning incorporates the 5 Key Elements of Impactful Project Management and can help you create an actionable plan. Download our Project Planning Checklist to begin project planning and develop a consistent project planning workflow.
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