Define Planning Phase

Planning Phase

The planning phase is the most critical step in completing development, acquisition, and maintenance projects. Careful planning, particularly in the early stages of a project, is necessary to coordinate activities and manage project risks effectively. The depth and formality of project plans should be commensurate with the characteristics and risks of a given project.

Project plans refine the information gathered during the initiation phase by further identifying the specific activities and resources required to complete a project.

A critical part of a project manager’s job is to coordinate discussions between user, audit, security, design, development, and network personnel to identify and document as many functional, security, and network requirements as possible. Primary items organizations should address in formal project plans include

Project Overview

Project overviews provide an outline of the project plan. Overviews should identify the project, project sponsors, and project managers; and should describe project goals, background information, and development strategies.

Roles and Responsibilities

Project plans should define the primary responsibilities of key personnel, including project sponsors, managers, and team members. Additionally, project plans should identify the responsibilities of third-party vendors and internal audit, security, and network personnel.

Communication

Defined communication techniques enhance project efficiencies. Therefore, management should establish procedures for gathering and disseminating information. Standard report forms, defined reporting requirements, and established meeting schedules facilitate project communications. Management should establish acceptance criteria for each project phase. Management should also establish appropriate review and approval procedures to ensure project teams complete all phase requirements before moving into subsequent phases.

Defined Deliverables

Clearly defined expectations are a prerequisite for successfully completing projects. Representatives from all departments involved in, or affected by, a project should assist in defining realistic project objectives, accurate informational, functional, and interface requirements, and objective acceptance criteria.

Control Requirements

An essential part of the planning process involves designing and building automated control and security features into applications. Identifying all required features and exactly where they should be placed is not always possible during initial project phases. However, management should consider security and control issues throughout a project’s life cycle and include those features in applications as soon as possible during a project’s life cycle.

Risk Management

Managing risks is an important part of the project planning process. Organizations should establish procedures to ensure managers appropriately assess, monitor, and manage internal and external risks throughout a project’s life cycle. The procedures should include risk acceptance, mitigation, and/or transfer strategies.

External risks include issues such as vendor failures, regulatory changes, and natural disasters. Internal risks include items that affect budgets, such as inaccurate cost forecasting or changing functional requirements; scheduling difficulties, such as unexpected personnel changes or inaccurate development assumptions; and work flow challenges, such as weak communication or inexperienced project managers.

Change Management

Personnel often request the addition or modification of functional requirements during software development projects. Although the addition or modification of requirements may be appropriate, standards should be in place to control changes in order to minimize disruptions to the development process. Project managers should establish cut-off dates after which they defer requested changes to subsequent versions. Additionally, representatives from the same departments involved in establishing requirements should be involved in evaluating and approving proposed changes. Large, complex, or mission-critical projects should include formal change management procedures.

Standards

Project plans should reference applicable standards relating to project oversight activities, system controls, and quality assurance. Oversight standards should address project methodology selections, approval authorities, and risk management procedures. System controls standards should address functional, security, and automated-control requirements. Quality assurance standards should address the validity of project assumptions, adherence to project standards, and testing of a product’s overall performance. Management should review, approve, and document deviations from established standards.

Documentation

Project plans should identify the type and level of documentation personnel must produce during each project phase. For instance, personnel should document project objectives, system requirements, and development strategies during the initiation phase. The documentation should be revised as needed throughout the project. For example, preliminary user, operator, and maintenance manuals created during the design phase should be revised during the development and testing phases, and finalized during the implementation phase.

Scheduling

Management should identify and schedule major project phases and the tasks to be completed within each phase. Due to the uncertainties involved with estimating project requirements, management should build flexibility into project schedules. However, the amount of flexibility built into schedules should decline as projects progress and requirements become more defined.

Budget

Managers should develop initial budget estimations of overall project costs so they can determine if projects are feasible. Managers should monitor the budgets throughout a project and adjust them if needed; however, they should retain a baseline budget for post-project analysis. In addition to budgeting personnel expenses and outsourced activities, it is important to include the costs associated with project overhead such as office space, hardware, and software used during the project.

Testing

Management should develop testing plans that identify testing requirements and schedule testing procedures throughout the initial phases of a project. End users, designers, developers, and system technicians may be involved in the testing process.

Staff Development

Management should develop training plans that identify training requirements and schedule training procedures to ensure employees are able to use and maintain an application after implementation.