FastPLAN™ Reality-Based Project Planning Workshops

These highly interactive facilitative planning sessions bring together all core project team members, and bring in stakeholders at key decision points. Each one to three-day FastPLAN™ workshop is geared to produce what you need now, whether it is a high-level plan for an entire complex project program or a detailed plan for the next phase of a critical project.

FastPLAN™ workshops promote a thorough understanding of key project or program roles and responsibilities, objectives and target schedules, key risks and contingencies. FastPLAN™ workshops are a powerful tool for project planning and team building.

Objective

FastPLAN™ workshops are designed to:

• Develop a clear understanding of a projects objectives
• Specify measurable success criteria and key results that must be achieved
• Develop clear roles and responsibilities for all team members
• Create a schedule for the program and perform initial optimisation analysis
• Identify risks and develop risk management plans

Benefits

As a result of these workshops, the project team will realise:

• Better business decision-making made possible through improved quality of project information
• Sharpened work focus through clearer understanding of the work, time, and resources required to achieve the project objectives
• A streamlined planning process allowing for an earlier start of the project and accelerated accomplishment of the project goals
• Increased work efficiency through the common understanding of project objectives and the activities required for their achievement
• Enhanced productivity achieved through better teamwork.

Areas of Concentration

Using the MasterPLAN™ Accelerated Project Scoping and Planning Techniques, FastPLAN™ workshops focus on the following areas:

• Project Definition (Project work is scoped, deliverables defined, and roles and responsibilities agreed upon).
• Dependencies (Dependencies between tasks are established, and interfaces are identified and defined).
• Preliminary Schedule (After task duration is estimated and the project plan loaded into a Microsoft Project™ file, a project schedule is developed and then discussed and optimised by the team).
• Risks and Risk Management Plans (key project risks are identified, and a plan is developed to monitor and control them. Particular attention is paid to the risks involved in the dependencies on other divisions / organisations).

Deliverables
The deliverable of the workshop consists of a set electronic files containing critical project information. While project-specific characteristics and variable group dynamics are expected to produce slight variance in results, the typical information includes:

• Project Definition Document - ~40 pages capturing all workshop planning results and documenting them in easy to read tables and lists (Microsoft Word™ format).
• Microsoft Project™ Schedule - ~15-20 pages containing ~300 tasks (Microsoft Project 2000™ Format)
• Issues Log - All open issues are captured and logged with owners and due dates (Microsoft Word™ format).