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Levels of planning

There are two major forms of planning:

  • Planning the work
  • Planning how to plan, monitor, and control the work

We can call them plans and meta-plans. For example, your plan for risks is a list of risks you’ve identified and your responses to them. The whole plan can be a spreadsheet called the risk register. Your meta-plan for risk would be a text document that describes the way you want to manage risks: the techniques you would use, the workflows, the artifacts, etc.

Each methodology tells you how to do each of these, and as such, some form of meta-plan is embedded into your methodology. However, it may not contain all the information you need in practice, and that’s why some resources recommend creating these meta-plans to complement the methodology.

Usually, the systems that expect upfront tailoring (e.g., PRINCE2®) also expect meta-plans, while those that prefer gradual, ongoing tailoring (e.g., P3.express) don’t enforce that. However, even in the second case, it would be a good idea to have them for areas that require more attention; for example, if procurement is a sensitive topic in your project, create a meta-plan for it. You can call it the procurement strategy, the procurement management plan, etc.

There are usually a lot of things in common among various projects run in an organization, and therefore, a meta-plan created in one can be usable (with some adjustments) in others. It’s best to create the meta-plans in a central place and make it available to all projects. While the projects use the meta-plans, they would adjust them, and some of the general adjustments could then be fed back to the central place to be used in future projects.

What’s described above is basically an important aspect of the first step of tailoring I explained in the principles section.

The centralized place that stores, distributes, and adjusts the meta-plan can have any name you want. A good option is a center of excellence. Another common term is PMO, which can stand for “project management office” among other things. Unfortunately, the term PMO is a vague one used for many purposes, and sometimes even has too much overlap with the project management system of individual projects, which is not a good idea.

Next: Project Work