Project Plan

At this point in the project you should have at least an outline project plan. Even in a project where your organisation may be relaxed about the overall deadline, there are a number of factors to be considered. Your scoping exercise should allow you to answer the following questions:

• Will you need to go through an EU procurement exercise and if so which route will you take as this affects the time required?

• Have you detailed all of the tasks that need to be carried out in order to define your requirements?

• Do you have sufficient experience to give realistic estimates of effort for these tasks?

• Who will be involved and what are the constraints on their availability?

• What resources do you need to carry out the supplier evaluations (e.g. rooms etc) and what are the constraints on their availability?

We consider project planning in more detail in the project management infoKit. At this point it is important that you have basic outline which is understood by all those involved. Without this simple tool a project can very easily fail to make progress.