Planning

Planning

Planning in organisations and public policy is both the organizational process of creating and maintaining a plan; and the psychological process of thinking about the activities required to create a desired outcome on some scale. As such, it is a fundamental property of intelligent behaviour. This thought process is essential to the creation and refinement of a plan, or integration of it with other plans, that is, it combines forecasting of developments with preparation of scenarios of how to react to them.

Definition of Project objective:

Planning within a group collaboration project is arguably the most important, yet often underestimated phase of all. In the formulation of the objectives it is useful to start with the end result and plan backwards to the beginning, ensuring that the objective is specific, manageable and built on time. The tasks within our group are materialised through the implementation of the following; sharing ideas between each other & best practice, identifying priorities, maximising limited resources, setting up a timeline which is flexible & ability to keep open mind in accepting a change.

A useful strategy is to divide the objectives into task, each with its own objective, timeline, defined inputs and outputs & responsible individual. Each one of us has our own tasks & a timeline in which the task needs to be completed. This timeline is used for major project tasks such as completion of 3d model in max, while other minor tasks are, also, distributed accordingly to each group member. Each major task has its own intended outcome, timeline, evaluation plan & method of disseminating outcomes.

Project SchedulingDevelopment of a project schedule involves working out how much time will be needed to meet the objectives and complete the tasks. The objectives and tasks can be refined by creating activity chart. Graphic expression has the advantage of demonstrating the independence of various tasks in a simple and understandable manner. This allows our leader to recognise unrealistic idea/plans & help us put the workable idea into action. In our case each sub-task has a specific timeline and target date for completion.

Consolidation of the plan
The final stage of the planning phase involves finalising objectives, tasks and schedules. This can be achieved by consolidating these elements into a well-integrated plan, with the inclusion of possible contingency plans. A good example of planning ahead would be my situation. As I’ll be leaving to go overseas after week 10, I informed my group of this fact in the timely manner and we managed to base our tasks completion timeline around my departure, and also determined what I tasks need to do before and after my departure. All the group members got together to discus the outcome of me leaving and how it might effects the group project. As a result we came up with a solid plan. Careful planning in our situation was lucrative as it could have created problems for our team if we had not established workable plan and stuck to it.

The key ingredient to successful project implementation is project leadership . The term "project leader" is preferred to "project manager". A project leader emphasises discipline within the group and runs the risk of getting others to perform tasks that would unmotivated them and as a result their performance would lack quality. Project leaders need to possess two core competencies, namely the possibility to generate ideas and the knowledge of how to implement these ideas. The leader should at once be implementer, manager/controller, shaper of events and agent of change. Our leader is Simon & he is the person that keeps things on track if they get out of focus. He has managed the team well.

Referances:
1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning