Principles of Project Planning

Stakeholder Roadmap

A stakeholder roadmap provides a strategic overview of the main components of the project.

A project plan provides the task-level details of the project that are presented on a timeline. 

The difference between the two is that a project plan is far more detailed in the tasks that are meant to be done, while a stakeholder roadmap is more of an overview of a project.

A stakeholder roadmap a strategic view of the project and does not include the day-to-day tasks. Nor does it include a detailed view of the roles and responsibilities and who will be working on what part of the project. It is used to help the project team present a quick overview of the project status to other teams which may include investors, executive staff and departments within the organisation.

Project timeline

The timeline shows what phases of the project are in the past, what the current progress is and what is still left to do to complete the project. It therefore is still left to do to complete the project. It therefore helps to keep projects on track.

Elements of a project timeline:

• start and due/end date of the tasks
• the duration of the tasks
• who the tasks are assigned to
• task dependencies 

Project timelines mean that there is set date for when the project is set to be completed by. This can potential mean that the project could end up being completed in a rushed state. However if there wasn't any deadline then the project may never get finished.

Linking a projects objectives to strategic objectives

Prioritisation -  a decision that is made that is made based on which projects are organisational priorities. When they are selected, they should be broken down into actionable steps.

Project management methodologies – there are many different types of project management methodologies, and it is important to make sure that you choose the right one when it comes to your project 

The roles of leadership – making sure you have a strong leadership is important because it can have a big influence on the project itself. You will want someone who is motivating and makes employees and stakeholders feel that the project will complete with them in charge. This also comes down to those who are leading the smaller tasks in the project. 

Completing the work – making sure that you have a strong leader, and strong methodology is crucial to making sure that the project is successful.

Why is a resource plan important?

A resource pan is created during the planning phase of a project. It helps to anticipate all the resources required to complete project. A good resource plan should be detailed and include several components that are important to the completion of the project. 

In the virtual tour project we discussed what resources we need in the planning phase before we started doing anything to make sure that we had accounted for everything that we needed.

In our virtual tour project we made sure to think about how we were going to use our resources and considered whether we needed to use them or not, to prevent underutilization of resources.

In our virtual tour project we did not account very for reducing task dependency and thus the flow of the project suffered as a result, we were often put into situation were people were waiting on others to complete there tasks before other people could move onto there's.

People and skills – everyone have a different skill set compared to someone else, so if you can utilise every person's skill in a project, it will make it more efficient and better at the end.

  
Estimates and costing – this is useful as it will make investors understand what they are getting into and will also allow them to see if the project is viable. For example, if we said to the college that we needed £5k, they would have most likely said that that price is ridiculous for a small VR tour and would have told us to downscale. We also had to ensure that the consumer was able to access it without having to pay for it. For example, we also put the videos on YouTube because it would be unreasonable for people to buy a £400 VR headset just to watch our VR tour.

Venues and premises – understanding this is important as in our case, we had to think about what is important to the actual project and what would be useful to film. As the Cheltenham campus is so big, we had to comprimise in the middle of the project to only film the IT department as filming all the departments in the time that we were given was just not feasible.

Facilities – in our case, we had access to high end facilities, with good computers which allowed us to render the film and edit the videos, code the website, and hosting it. Without the facilities that the college provides, we would not have nearly completed the college as efficiently.

Equipment – making sure you have equipment that is relevant to what you are trying to make is crucial. If we didn't have access to a 360 camera, the project just wouldn't have had the same effect that it did. We also wouldn't have been able to test it without the VR headsets, meaning that we wouldn't have found some of the faults that we found during our testing phases.

Hardware and software – you want to find software and hardware that are best suited to what you are doing at a reasonable price. We made sure that all the software that we used was free and tried to get the equipment for as cheap as possible.

  
Stakeholder engagement – making sure that your stakehoders are kept engaged is important because.