Congratulations, you have just been appointed to your first project management role and you are feeling empowered and confident. You are chomping at the bit to get going, to prove to those superiors who put their faith in you that you are a bright, dynamic individual who can achieve even more than they expected you could. You have no desire to be cooped up in an office trawling through data or planning projections or strategies and, what is more, neither do your team who are enthusiastic and back you all the way.

What can possibly go wrong?

Well, whilst positive action and a desire to 'get out there' are to be applauded, all too often project managers (PMs) sacrifice careful planning and considered analysis for wild, ill-conceived activity. In the case of many inexperienced PMs it is born out of a desire to be 'seen to be doing something' which may be admirable but it is worth remembering that more can be achieved by measured pre-planning than by charging around like a headless chicken.

So what are the areas of a project that require this careful deliberation and planning? The initial, and in many ways most important, question is 'what do the stakeholders concerned in this project want out of it?'

To a project manager the goal of a given project may appear simple and obvious but that it only because it is their own particular goal in their own part of the overall process. Stakeholders are not always clear-cut; for every project sponsor there will be a number of people with indirect investment in the project and the PM needs to be absolutely clear about what they want the project to achieve as well. The best way to find this out is to conduct detailed stakeholder interviews and formulate a list of goals from these encounters.

This list can now be transformed into a Project Deliverables plan whereby the processes required to achieve all the separate goals are outlined, alongside estimated delivery times. These estimates are refined in the next part of the plan which is the Project Schedule. This stage is all about identifying and allocating the correct amount of time and resources required to achieve each deliverable and fitting them all into an overarching schedule to ensure the successful completion of each deliverable.

It is at this stage of the process that the PM will discover whether the goals of all the stakeholders are realistic based on the estimates of the project schedule. If they are not then immediate negotiation is required with the project sponsor to find some kind of compromise that suits all parties.

If none of this planning process is engaged in by the project manager then the project runs the risk of flying off wildly in all directions, wasting time and resources and ultimately frustrating both the team and the stakeholders. Taking the time to construct a proper project plan is neither procrastination nor boring. It is absolutely essential if the project is to enjoy any chance of ultimate success.