There are many Project Managers and Stakeholders who refer to the Project Schedule (usually built in Microsoft Project or equivalent) as “The Project Plan”. This is not true. The schedule shows “who, what and when” but does not address “how”. A plan must address “how” or it is not a plan. I will address the Project Schedule in a separate series of posts.

The prerequisite to building a schedule is to identify all of the activities, and in order to do that you need a Project Plan. Activities will also be drawn from the Project Management Plan (refer to prior series of posts for more on this). This overview will list the main topics of the Project Plan and subsequent posts will do a deeper dive into each topic.

Here are the elements of the Project Plan:

• The Development Plan
• The Operations Plan
• The Organizational Change Management Plan
• The Test Plan
• The Migration Plan
• The Pilot Plan
• The Deployment Plan
• The Support Plan (post-implementation)
• The Support Plan (during the project and stabilization)

You will not necessarily need all of these plans for a given project. It is good practice to review each one for every project to see if they apply. Some of these topics will require multiple posts to give them the depth they deserve.