2. Project Planning

The Requirements Document provides the basic outline of project planning in terms of resources, timing and overall budget details.

However, the design stage is where the nitty gritty details need to be described.

Project planning is all about handling people: how many, where and when are they needed. In addition those people will need resources to carry out their jobs: computers, offices etc. There are a number of different project planning tools which will be used during this stage in order to effectively plan out the project, timescale and the resources required. These include:

• Gantt Charts
• Critical Path Analysis (CPA)
• Project Management Software

The diagram below shows the outline of a gantt chart

Activities are listed down the side, and a time line goes across, with a status column included on the right.

The coloured bars show the time plan of the project and how one activity depends on other activities.

Gantt charts can be very extensive for a large project and will probably need a specialist software package to deal with the complexity. A simple one as shown above can be created with standard office applications.