Clarizen Approach to Building Project Plan

Many Clarizen customers ask what the best approach to build a project work plan is.
There are many different methodologies to plan a project, such as Waterfall, Agile, Extreme, Rolling wave, Delivery Driven and etc. These methods use either top-down or bottom-up approaches to manage planning processes. Each methodology and approach can be the right choice for the organizational processes running in your company.

Clarizen recommends combining top-down and bottom-up approaches that allow project managers to involve the whole project team in the project activities at a very early stage. This approach also allows project managers to use high level planning at the initial planning stage of a project and then work on more detailed plans as each sub-phase approaches.

Clarizen believes that communication and collaboration around project planning and execution is a guarantee for project success. Several recent studies have shown that around 90% of a project team’s time is spent on communication, thus managing communication properly is a KEY to generate efficiency of a project.

 Top-down high level planning is generally managed solely by the project manager, while bottom-up planning is usually delegated to the functional or operation managers responsible for the execution of specific work within the project.
The final project plan will be a result of collaboration and negotiation between these stakeholders.
Clarizen recommends that you start top-down planning when building project’s work plan schema using the following techniques:

• Build high level views of the project’s main phases (stages) and their deliverables. In other words, start building the project roadmap of the corresponding milestones.
• Simplify managing complex projects by using project modularization, meaning, divide project into simplified subprojects that can be handled concurrently by different units or people.
• Build required dependencies between corresponding subprojects and their milestones.

Using Clarizen, you can maintain dependencies between work items across all levels of the subprojects in both horizontal and vertical directions. (Read more about managing multiple projects in Managing Multi-Project Environment article on the Clarizen community site. Read also about the mechanism of Shortcuts that can be very helpful in creating dependencies between different work items and projects running in parallel.).
After you finish building a Project’s work plan schema, you are ready for further detailing of the work plan. This detailing can be done by the project manager or, even better, by delegating it to the functional managers of the corresponding areas for bottom-up detailing of the actual work.

Bottom-Up planning is commonly done by the functional or operation managers responsible for the actual execution of a specific project area and is often done as the project is running rather than in the initial planning phase. A Project Manager can assist and add major tasks that will be further detailed by the functional manager.
Taking this approach, the Project Manager remains responsible for the project management and overall delivery schedule, while the Functional Manager is responsible for the specific task planning and their execution deadlines.
In the case that the detailed plan reveals that the required work cannot be fulfilled in the timeframe defined at the top-down stage of planning, Clarizen will display a conflict indicator. All relevant managers will be notified of the conflict and they can collaborate and negotiate around the dates and content of the specific work.
There are different approaches to Bottom-Up planning but since things have a tendency to change, in many cases you won’t want to create detailed plans for the work activities that happen far in advance from the project start date. In this case, give a high level estimation for such work to ensure that you can meet the required timeframe and then “plan as you go”.