Project Start-Up and Planning

Planning Techniques

A number of tried and tested planning techniques are available to use, each with different levels of complexity. Further information on some of these can be found within the Planning section of our Project Management infoKit.

A Task List has been supplied for you to download and tailor to your FPP implementation which you can use to form the basis of your implementation plan.

A simple but useful graphical tool that can help you visualise the project schedule is a Gantt Chart, a bar chart invented by Henry Gantt. An example Gantt chart for the pre-implementation phase listed in the Task List has been produced as part of this applied infoKit.

Project Initiation Document

The single most important piece of documentation you will produce at this stage, and probably during the course of the entire project, is a Project Initiation Document (PID). This may also be called a Project Scoping Document, Project Outline, Project Management Plan or sometimes even a Project Brief. As a starting point for implementing the FPP, a draft template Project Initiation Document with some pointers is included here.