Session: Level of Detail for Project Planning
Speaker: Mat Hart, Head of Production, Ninja Theory
Presentation is designed to be nuts and bolts rather than high-level theory.
Planning.
What’s the purpose of a Project Plan?
- Reduce risk. Allows you to manage your risks. Front load and cut them early.
- Reduces uncertainty. Allows you to build in time for prototyping.
- Supports good decision making. A good decision is picking one of many options with info to help you.
- Establishes trust. Stakeholders like to know what’s going on.
- Conveys information, communicates.
How much detail?
- Too much – granularity to 2-hour increments. Way too much time spent updating managing the schedule rather than doing the work.
- Too little – Doesn’t inform the people who are doing the work what is to be accomplished in real time.
- Just right – takes practice to pin down. 1-5 days usually.
Three Levels of Planning
- Low-level. Deliverable centric, task-driven.
- Medium. Phase centric, deliverable-driven.
- High level. Project centric, driven by phase milestones.
You will want a high to low-level approach. Don’t expect the first pass at the schedule to be accurate, but it’s still a good exercise that will help you get to the actual schedule.
Stakeholders.
Who do you think they are? Who’s working on your project and who needs to know about what’s going on with your project.
Stakeholder analysis is a straightforward way to dissect who needs what information at what point.
General list:
@Publisher: Executive, production, pr/marketing, specialists,
@Developer: Executives, production mgmt, and team
@Other: Customer, Press/Media
What should we know about them?
None of these: perceptions of the project, emotions, constraints, nor Project engagement.
Keep it broad:
Who are they?
What do they do?
How do you get in contact with them?
How much power do they have to affect the project constraints?
How much interest do they have to the effect the project constraints?
How do we build a schedule that satisfies their varying needs?
Break into phases then treat each phase as a mini-project.
Each phase has a goal (may be theoretical.) Define the Phase goals in practice:
1. Project Goals
2. Design Docs
3. Feature List (medium level of detail)
4. Define quality for each feature..
5. Generate success (or exit) criteria. This the goal used in managing expectations.
6. Generating work estimates.
Keep the plan going after it’s established. The producers and leads are supported by a distributed schedule and it’s maintained on an ongoing basis. All tasks are either done or not done, there’s no percentage complete. Producers review daily. Head of production reviews in depth weekly.
<Examples of how MS Project has been used on Mat’s projects>
