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In a project, there are a lot of activities that go into the big picture, but little or no effort has been put into mapping out each activity in some sort of alive and breathing human plan of action. Often times, these maps are termed "action plans". But for the sake of this article we will refer to all written plans as a project, as you might find on an Accredited PRINCE2 Foundation Course training.
PRINCE2 Project off the Ground
| Perhaps a better way of looking at a project then to ask yourself what it is. A project is a group effort. It's a collection of people who work together in some sort of a group structure to produce something that may become a product of the group, product, service, or process that your company provides.
Some teams work more as educated teams, and others work as fast paced wrote teams. Now that you have envisioned "something", how does it get made into a living breathing product of any sort?
The first step is have the team form a project team. Not as you think, suggest that you are able to start a project, but actually form a team. Now you need to assign roles and responsibilities to names and titles and get to all team members consensus on what they can bring to the table. Next, you will need a project plan. This can be as simple as few as a few blue prints that are written up on a white board. But in a complex environment it's necessary to have all team members sign off on what makes up the project as a whole and get input for their own idea of how the team should take that blue print to the end result. Then you will need an assignment book or task list that has all the necessary written details that need to be tracked as the work progresses.
After all this you may have a business management plan and accounting estimates, and a marketing plan. Who will be doing what should be tied down to a time schedule to pull it all together so you can hit the launch date. To get a launch date you may need to hire new consultants, decorate your conference rooms, or get your PM to take your marketing plan to the next step. All of this combined is known as a project launch. Now you are ready to launch and run your project.
But as you may have guessed from the above drumming up a launch schedule, this can get delayed until the project finishes or there are problems along the way. To get things back on track, assessments are sure to announce that a project launched is a failure so now they will hit the shades for Virtual heart or details on the design team. With the schedule up, you have a go-nowhere team. Now you need to go back to step 1 and shift the details over to the plan of what needs to happen, how long, and how you will do those things. Between the assessment and the redesign of the plan, a release can be planned. There are many options, and what takes the most time is different for company wide projects compared to individual projects.
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