What Is A Successful Project Planning?

Hi Everyone,

Managing a project is not an easy task especially when dealing with major projects. It involves lots of challenges like proper goals and objectives, road bumps, managing team and budget, communication with resources, and other unavoidable circumstances. To manage a project, one needs proper skills, for example, leadership skills, management skills and more. As we know, the project manager holds the responsibility to ensure the project is being properly executed and completed successfully. We can say basically project manager is the captain or leader who determines the success or failure of a project. Basically the points below is what a project manager has to plan before executing any project. Besides that, a proper project management tool is required for planning. For example, they can use any software tools if they have, and the simple, fast easy and free tool to use is Microsoft Project where we can generate a proper Gantt chart to keep track the project.

Let’s see what are the main things as a Project Manager has to plan ahead in order to execute a project and complete successfully. Basically what, when, who, why, where, how, what if. These are the common questions that a project managers have in their project planning.

1) What

What is the goal of the project?

What is required?

What to do to plan the project?

What is the objective of the project planned?

What is the duration of the project?

What are the outputs expected at the end of a project?

What is the project about, i.e. whether it’s a housing, factory, shop lots, apartment, office, and etc?

What are the scopes involved?

What is the budget?

What are the issues and risks involved?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of the project?

What is the equipment/software/machinery required?

2) When

When is the project starting date?

When is the estimated delivery or due date to meet the goal?

When is the first meeting with stakeholders?

3) Who

Who are the stakeholders?

Who are the project team members and roles?

Who is the decision maker?

Who is the customer?

Who are the financial sponsors?

Who are the legal advisors?

Who are involved in the project?

Who is working on the project?

Who will be responsible for documentation and submission?

4) Why

Why additional number of days required?

Why is the project necessary?

Why financial backup is required?

Why additional resources are needed for?

Why submission of the document has deadline?

Why need to complete project as scheduled?

Why legal issues might be involved?

5) Where

Where are the resources coming from?

Where is the project location?

Where we plan to be?

The above WH questions are important for a Project Manager to have before Planning for a project. To summarize the WH questions, I have listed the 5 main important things involved for a successful project planning.

A summary of Project Planning integration

Happy reading everyone.

From

Shamani Nair

Maximizing Microsoft Excel : Colour Your Data According to Conditions

Many people who handle lots of data in Microsoft Excel know the importance of colouring their data. Colouring data is a practical and efficient way to visualize and understand the data in your spreadsheet. Without colours, your data will look very boring and your eyes will become tired of going through the data and finding the wanted data, for example, delayed shipment dates, product quantity below the minimum value, employee salary scale, top 10 students in exam, and etc.

So what people will do is create a colour code and change the cell or font colour according to the colour codes, like shown below in a logistics company example:

This idea works, but what if the data keeps changing? A shipment’s data can always be delayed or pushed forward to another date. Scores of new shipments can be scheduled in a day. Are you going to change the colours to your dates whenever it changes? Are you going to assign colours to the 20 to 30 new shipments one by one? What if there are 100 shipments with different dates to be coloured? Isn’t it troublesome?

To rectify this problem, Microsoft Excel has a feature called Conditional Formatting. Using conditional formatting, Excel automatically assign colours to your data without you needing to do it manually. All you have to do is first create the condition that you are looking for, and specify the colour that meets the condition. In our shipment example above, you can see that even with 10 shipment details, things can get messy. If you want to colour the date according to the colour codes specified, you need to set the conditions or rules for colours to be implemented.

Step 1

Select or highlight all the dates in the table. Do not highlight the “Shipment Date” title, as it is not part of the data. Then go to the “Home” tab, click on “Conditional Formatting” and then on “Highlight Cells Rules”, and choose “A Date Occuring…”.

Step 2

You will find the next screen appearing in your Excel. Let’s try to colour the cells of the dates that occur today. From the “A Date Occurring” window, select “Today” from the left selection box and “Custom Format” from the right selection box.

Step 3

In the next screen, go to the “Fill” tab, and choose the yellow colour. Click “OK”, and again “OK” in the next screen.

You will find that the dates that occurs today will be coloured in yellow:

For the shipment number SH001, try changing the its date to today’s date, and you will find that Excel colours it in yellow automatically:

Repeat Step 1, 2 and 3 for the other colour codes. In Step 2, specify “Tomorrow” and “Yesterday” for the left selection box and assign the appropriate colours respectively. You will find the dates coloured similar to the picture below:

So now you will see that the dates has been coloured and makes it easy for you to detect the dates that need attention, such as today’s shipments. Instead of you scrutinizing the dates one by one, you will know that you need to sort out 2 shipments that is overdue and needs solution or immediate actions.

Let’s add another row for new shipment details. In the following diagram, notice that the date is not highlight even though we have already created the rule. Notice that the new data set is in row 18 in the spreadsheet.

Highlight all the dates again. Go to “Home” tab, choose “Conditional Formatting” and click on “Manage Rules”. You will find the list of rules or conditions that you have created for the date colours:

You can see clearly what the first and second column states. In the third column “Applies to”, you will find the columns and rows in the Excel spreadsheet where the rules are applied, which is where you can find the dates. Notice that the rules only apply in column C and rows 8 to 17. Change the row from $C$17 to $C$18. Click “OK”.

You will the date in your new shipment details is coloured.

So there you go; a simple way of starting off with Conditional Formatting to colour your data according to a set of conditions. There are many more of these conditions that you can specify. Try exploring more of these capabilities and you will be rewarded with more easier and exciting way of getting your work done.

Subashkaran