Making a Great First Impression: Crafting an Effective Project Plan

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You’ve been tasked with leading a new project and know that first impressions matter. The project plan you create represents your chance to instil confidence and demonstrate capabilities. Consider it your blueprint for success.

An effective project plan identifies goals, deliverables, timelines and resources. Use it to align stakeholders and create transparency during project sync-up meetings and reviews. As a good practice, clock all updates directly within the living document to maintain an accurate, single source of truth which will be shared with all stakeholders to ensure open collaboration and transparency.

The iron triangle of project management — the 3 constraints that all project management abide by (Source)

As a project manager (and as a program manager), I consider the project plan as one of the most important artefacts (document). I use it as a baseline for the scope, timeline and cost (the iron triangle of project management) and use it to run my project sync-up meetings effectively.

What Is a Project Plan and Why It Matters

A project plan is a series of formal documents that define the execution and control stages of a project. The plan includes…