Failing to plan is planning to fail. Proper planning prevents poor performance. A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow. You’ve heard them all; planning is important. But it is also complex, intensive, and requires a little finesse with a crystal ball. Of projects that experience schedule slippage, 60 percent use no planning tools or methods; another 30 percent used planning methodology but not tools. Who knows what happens to the other 10 percent, but the majority tracked slippage back to lack of proper planning. This is why many PMI methodology tools are designed to aid this crucial step. Let’s take a look at three tools that can help a project start on the right note.

Project Charter. The charter outlines the scope and objectives of a project, as well as who will participate. Not only does this help focus attention, energy, and resources, it can be given to stakeholders to apprise them of the status of a project. There are a number of different templates you can use, or you can create your own. Typically, though, they contain information related to:

• Why a project is needed at all
• The objectives and goals
• The identification of the project manager
• Budget and other constraints
• Participants, stakeholders
• Deliverables
• Milestone schedule
• Authorization to undertake project

PERT Chart. This is another way to organize workflow, milestones, deliverables, timetables, and other components of a project, and it is more visual so you can see the project as a whole. Another benefit is that you can lay out the critical path, or the longest path from initiation to completion, which tends to accelerate the completion of activities. Although the opposite is also true; subjective time estimates may be too lenient.

Again, there are various templates you can use, as well as software to help you develop one of your own.

Work Breakdown Structure. According to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, a work breakdown structure is a “deliverable oriented hierarchical decomposition of the work to be executed by the project team.” So, there you have it. What it really does, though, is break up a big complex project into manageable tasks with corresponding durations and costs. Don’t worry about decomposing; in this case, it just means breaking deliverables down into sub-deliverables until they can be assigned to a single person.

Taking the time to carefully and thoroughly plan a project can help you stay on course and on budget; you cannot avoid emergencies, changes, or other unknowns, but, hopefully, you can avoid having me show up on your doorstep in the middle of a project.