Making your plan

- I've just been describing how it's a really bad idea to hold a project plan in your head. We need to draw it out in some way. I want to show you what I would recommend as the best way to draw this out. This is the APM process, the Association of Project Managers, or PMI, if you're in America. A lot of project management books will recommend two things. They'll recommend what's called a network diagram, and a Gantt chart. What I've realized is we need both. Quite often in books, they just say, the network diagram's great for thinking about dependencies, and the Gantt chart is great for thinking about timescales. But they don't really make the point very clearly that you need both, and you absolutely do need both. That's what I'm just going to show you, here. I'm going to take an example that's fairly dear to my heart, 'cause this is planning a wedding. My daughter had her wedding recently, and we did actually do this. I'm going to show you a simplified version of it just for demonstration purposes, okay? The first thing you do is you just get a list of all the tasks, and I mentioned that, and then you estimate the times of the tasks. Then you put them on some sort of, some sort of plan, some sort of network diagram. What I've done is I've just prepared, pre-prepared on here a whole load of Post-it notes with tasks, and that's what you would do. Let's say, for example, we need to decide who we're going to invite. We need a guest list, so stick that one there. We need to get a venue. I've got all my tasks on here in roughly the right places, and these tasks just came from a big brain dump of everything. Actually, while you're sticking them on, you might even think of a few more tasks. Just get another Post-it and bang them on. This is roughly the right order. I then need to put the dependencies, so I'm probably going to think about the budget first, and then decide what venue I can afford. Once I've got the venue, I can look at availability of the venue, and I can set a date. That's quite a key moment, really, isn't it? Once I've set a date, then I'm probably going to think about the timings, exactly, of my day, what's going to happen when, and I think that does depend on the venue, because, you know, is it available in the morning, or the afternoon, or whatever? Now, the guest list of who I'm going to invite probably depends on my budget. It probably doesn't depend on the venue, but I think it depends on the budget. Printing the invitations. I need to know who I'm going to invite, but I also need to know what time to put on the invitations. That needs both of those things. Then I can send invitations, see who's going to come, get my final list of attendees. Then I can do my seating plan. I probably can't do the seating plan 'til I know who's coming, which means I need to have done the inviting. Obviously, before the day, I need the seating plan. Then I've got to book the catering, and I think I probably need to know what time of day I need the caterer, so I think that comes from the timings, and I need the catering before the day, obviously. Then there's buying the dress. Now, what does that depend on? Probably not setting the date, well, actually, I think it probably does, because I don't think I would actually buy the dress until we definitely had a date booked. Let's say that that depends on there, and then, the dress doesn't really affect anything else. I just need that before the day. Now, I've put one more little Post-it note on here, all the things I've missed out. For the sake of this demonstration, I haven't thought about the cake, the photographer, the stag do and hen do, the honeymoon, so all these other things, I just haven't done. But in real life, you would need all of those on here as well. Let's say that this is your plan. You then can look at how long these things are going to take. Setting the budget, I can do that fairly quickly. Let's just say I need a week to debate that with my other half and try to persuade my parents to fork out lots of money. Then, getting a venue, I'm going to say I'm going to spend four weeks doing that, because I think that's quite, that's going to take some research, visiting, looking at places. Setting the date's going to be really quick, and then the timings are going to be really quick. I'm going to say it's going to take me a couple of weeks to debate the guest list, 'cause again, that's quite political of who we're going to invite. Printing the invitations could take a while if we're going to go for old-fashioned paper invitations, so let's say that's going to take me six weeks to do. Now I'm going to send them out, but I'm going to have to probably wait a month 'til I know who's coming, 'cause I'm not going to hear back from people straight away. Then I can do the seating plan. Let's say the caterers need six weeks' notice, at least, before the wedding. They've got to buy all the food and plan all of that. The day itself is a zero. It's just an event. That has no duration. Buying the dress, I know nothing about wedding dresses, but for the sake of this demonstration, let's say that it's going to take 12 weeks to get the dress made or fitted or whatever they do with wedding dresses. Let's say this is my plan for the wedding. Now, you can already see you wouldn't want to to keep this in your head. It's far better to draw this out. Particularly, you can work on this with several people. A group of you could say, "Well, I think we should do it in this order, "and I think, you know, "should we get the venue and then decide the budget," or whatever. A team of you can debate it when you've got it drawn out. It's much better than just having it in your head. Once you've got this, you can then look for the longest path through, which tells you how long the project's going to take, and you can see the longest path from this to get to the six, it's much slower to go through the four and the one and the one than it is to go through the two. Now, this 12 could be the longest path, but it actually isn't, because coming through here is longer, and this one's longer than this one, isn't it? I reckon that this is the longest path through here. Just checking that that 12 is definitely shorter than one, six, one, four, one, isn't it? So, how long is it going to take me before I can get married, and the answer is it's five, six, seven, plus six is 13, 14, 18, it's going to take me 19 weeks. So, in theory, I could get married 19 weeks from today, or my daughter could. Another way to think about it is that I need to decide at least 19 weeks ahead of the day, I need to start this process, if I'm working back from a finished date. So, if I want to get married, say, by Christmas, I need to work back 19 weeks before then. I now know how long my project's going to take. This thing's called a network diagram. It's sometimes called a critical path diagram, or sometimes also called a PERT chart. I just call it a Post-it note diagram when I run my training courses. The Post-its are quite low-tech, I totally accept that they're low-tech, but I think they're better than a computer because several people can all just move stuff around. It's just quicker and easier. Post-it notes on a whiteboard, or even just Post-it notes on a big sheet of paper, I think they're better than a computer. This is the heart of the planning process because this is when we actually decide how we're going to do this thing. When are we going to get the dress? Do we need this before this, et cetera. That's the first part of the planning process. Now, I mentioned at the start of this video that we need both this and a Gantt chart. I want to show you that now. What I'm going to do is I'm going to squeeze a little Gantt chart just down in the corner here. It's not ideal because I don't have a huge amount of space, but I want to show you how you can then very easily make this into a Gantt chart. I'm just going to rub out that arrow, if you can just imagine that the arrow is still there, and we're just going to draw a little Gantt chart down in the corner. The first thing we need for a Gantt chart is our timescale across the top. We've already seen that this adds up to 19, so we just want from naught to 19 on here, so let's call it 20. Let's just call it five, 10, 15, 20. I would use Excel for this in the ideal world, but I'm just going to show it to you briefly with pens, okay? It's just like an Excel spreadsheet, so you can see how you would do it with Excel. Once we've got our timescale, we then just put in the critical path, and we just focus on the red path, nothing else. It's really easy. We just put in one week for the budget and we put in four weeks for the venue, so that takes us to there. I'll just put a V for venue, then we put a week for setting the date, a week for planning the timings. We're up to seven now, and then six weeks for the invitations, so that took us to 13. I'll put print invitations on there, Then we're going to send, just post them off. Then we've got four weeks to get our final list of attendees. That takes us to 18, and then we've got one more week for the seating plan. That's 19 weeks to do our critical path, and the day itself, usually, events are just drawn as a line like that. They have no duration, it's just a vertical line. That's our critical path on there, and then the floating tasks just go in between. For example, the guest list comes any time after we've set the budget, and it has to be done before we print the invitations. So, somewhere in here, we're going to agree the guest list. I'll just put it in the middle for the moment. Little two-week floating tasks somewhere in between here and here. I'll put a G for guest list. We've got a choice of when we do that. As long as it's done before here, then we can print the invitations. That's the guest list floating in there. The catering is any time after we've planned the timings, which is here. That's planning the timings, isn't it? So, it's any time after that, and it has to be done, so, the catering has to be done after they plan the timings, and it has to be done before the day, so anywhere between here and here, we can put the catering. I'll put that in quite early. I'll put that in there, that's the catering. So, I've got quite a lot of choice about when we do that one. And then, finally, there was buying the dress, and you remember, this one comes after setting the date, so it comes after here. I'm going to put it above the critical path just to save some space, but normally, you would put all the floating tasks under the critical path. Just to save a bit of space, I'm going to put it in here, it's a 12. Now, how much float has it got? It hasn't got a lot of float, actually, 'cause if you add up all of these, you've got one, seven, eight, 12, 13. It's only got one week of float, so I think we need to get on with buying the dress absolutely immediately. That's buying the dress, and we've only got one week of safety margin. That's pretty tight, so I would want to keep a close look at that. But in theory, it's a floating task, and it's got one week of float. It's a little bit scruffy-looking, and I would recommend using Excel for this. I've made a YouTube video you can look at. However you draw it, this is the Gantt chart. Why is the Gantt chart worth having? Why don't we just have the Post-its? The answer is, the Gantt chart shows everything to scale. We can now see what's critical and what's floating. We can see that this has got lots of float, the guest list. We can see that the dress has very little float, so we've got to keep an eye on that. We can choose earlier or later, but we can also look vertically on the Gantt chart, and we can see what's happening at the same time as what. We can see that here, we are, what are we doing? We're getting the wedding dress, we're printing the invitations, and we are arranging the catering. The question is, can we do all three of those things at the same time? Now, we probably can, because printing the invitations is waiting for the printer, so that's not too bad. But if these were activities that required quite a lot of work, we could start to ask ourselves, have we got enough time to do it all at once? If you are too busy, you might want to move some of your floating tasks so they don't line up with other times when you're busy. The Gantt chart allows you to see the project much more clearly in terms of a real timeline, and you can actually put real dates along here so that you can actually put things in your diary and you can say to the person, this is when we're going to be looking at venues, so we need to allocate some time in our diary when we're going to do that. We know when each thing's going to happen. This is when we're going to be posting the invitations. We know the actual date. For the floating tasks, it helps us to remember, you know, this is when you've got to do this floating task. The Gantt chart is really good for seeing a timescale. That's the Gantt chart. You can also use the Gantt chart for monitoring your progress. When we get to, let's say, week 13, we have a now line which, in the old days, used to be a piece of string that we'd move along, but nowadays, it would be on the computer. So, you have a now line, and then you can color in what you've done. Let's say by the time we get to week 13 that we've got the budget, we've got the venue, we have set the date, we've planned the timings, and that's all we've done. How is our plan doing, and the answer is not very well! We're not keeping up with the now line, are we? We should be halfway through getting the dress by now, we should have printed the invitations, we should have got the catering arranged, and we should have agreed the guest list. That's what you want to see. The colored-in Gantt chart gives me an instant view of how's the project doing. If somebody else was doing this project for me, and I wanted to monitor progress, the one question I would ask them is, can I see your colored-in Gantt chart? If they say, "What's a Gantt chart, it's all in my head," I would definitely worry, 'cause I want to see it drawn out, colored in, clear and easy to see. That's why a Gantt chart is so great. It's very clear to see the progress. Everybody can see their part of it, and you've got a real timescale. Just to sum this up, I think you need both of these. You do need to go through the Post-its to get to the Gantt chart, because how could you jump straight to this? It needs to know the critical path first, and then the floaters all hang off that. To find the critical path, you have to do the Post-its, and you have to decide on the running order. The Post-its are great for that. You get the running order, get the critical path, and then it's dead easy to draw the Gantt chart based on that. So, you need both. Do not try to have all of this in your head. It's never going to work.