How to Create a Project Plan

Good, Better, Best

A good project plan provides your team with direction and important context. It creates a shared understanding of responsibilities, goals, and deadlines.

A great project plan sets realistic expectations. It clarifies project outputs and estimates project costs and resources. Finally, the best project plans are proactive. They predict issues before they happen and provide guidance on how to handle them. They create a plan for communication and receiving feedback.

5 Main Sections of a Project Plan

This is where you put together the things that you have discussed in your project kickstart and initiation phase.

Five main sections comprise a typical project plan. Some project plans may go into more or less detail depending on the team, management style, and scope of the project. However, these five sections will provide you with a solid foundation.

What Differentiates a Successful Project Plan?

Project plans fail when objectives and tasks are generic, accountability is centralized, and the team constraints or project risks aren’t incorporated. Project plans need to be specific, well-researched, and proactive. It’s worth the extra time and effort to make your project plan as accurate and effective as possible. Otherwise, the issues in your project plan will only manifest in your project’s execution—and potentially prevent you from achieving your goals.

Section	What to Include	Description
1. Project Overview	Reasons for initiation	Why a project was started.
	Market opportunities or other contextual information	Identify any market opportunities or other contextual information about the environment in which the project operates.
2. Project Goals and Deliverables	Tangible products & outputs of the project	Specify the physical or digital items that the project aims to produce. Make project goals and deliverables as specific and measurable as possible. Define the goals clearly so they can be quantified and tracked throughout the project.
3. Implementation and Scheduling	Assign tasks	Assign the names of individual team members to each task to indicate who owns it and is responsible for its execution and completion.
	Set deadlines	While you need to provide a project completion deadline, you should also assign deadlines to individual tasks or key project milestones to help the project stay on track. Short-term deadlines will help you monitor if your team is falling behind on long-term deadlines.
	Create a schedule	Organize all of the tasks, responsibilities, and deadlines into a schedule. The schedule should be visual and easy for team members to quickly see what they’re responsible for and when their tasks are due.
4. Resource Requirements	Team support	What support do you need from which people?
	Budget	What’s your deadline and budget?
	Resource distribution	- How will you distribute resources across the project and its phases? - Describe where and how you will obtain and distribute necessary project resources.
5. Risk Management and Communication	Risk management plan	Risks are potential issues or threats to the successful completion of the project. A risk management plan identifies these risks and defines strategies or contingency plans for dealing with them. Documenting risks and defining strategies for handling them beforehand gives the project team and stakeholders clear action steps to take before risks can grow into larger issues.
	Communication plan	Communication plays a critical role in identifying and solving problems right away. A communication plan defines how critical project information will be delivered and at what frequency. It establishes weekly team meetings or check-ins with the client at key project milestones. It gives your project team clear, effective, and open lines of communication for sharing project updates, clarifying goals and priorities, and communicating issues or asking for help. It also sets expectations for giving and receiving feedback from the client or executive management.

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