Joint project planning session

v     (First part)

       The Joint project planning session is a group session which all of the people are involved in the project meet to develop the detailed plan.

 In JPP session the project can accomplished with in a specified time frame, budget, resource, availabilities and customer specification.

In this the planning process shares many of the features as:

·        Joint requirement planning (JRP)

JRP session is commonly used to design computer application.

·        Joint applications design (JAD)

JAD is robust that is used for any type of project including the design and development of computer application.

Objective of JPP Session

The main objective of JPP Session is to develop a project plan that meets the conditions of satisfaction as negotiated between the requestor and the provider.

Reasons of JPP Session

1.  People are generally impatient to get on with the work of the project.

2. We do not time for proper planning.

3.  This project’s is eleventh hour, which is too late to recover from a poor plan.

Planning the JPP Session

Planning is essential to good project management. The plan is generate dynamic document. It changes as the project commences. In JPP Sessions the good planning is painful but the poor planning is even more painful. The document consider in JPP Sessions is POS. The POS can develop in a number of ways. It is an idea for consideration. It will probably be developed by one individual that is the project manager. It can be departmentally based or cross- departmentally based. It developed as the first phase of JPP. The JPP session being by discussing and clarifying exactly what is intended by the POS. The project team might also use this opportunity to write the PDS for their understanding of the project.

Attendees of JPP Session      

 The JPP participants are invited from among those who affected by or have input into the project. The project involves deliverables or is a new process or procedure, any one who has input to the process, receive output from the process or handles deliverables that invited to participate in the JPP.

Ø Facilitator:

 A successful JPP Session requires an experienced facilitator. The facilitator is responsible for conducting the JPP. It is important that the facilitator not have interest or bring biases to the Session because that would diminish the effectiveness of the plan. It must be developed with open mind, not biased mind.

Ø Project manager:

Project manager is not leading the planning session; he or she can concentrate on the plan itself; that is the project manager’s major role in the JPP. Having the proposed project manger facilitate the JPP session may seem to be an excellent choice. Project manager is the one who has final responsibility when it comes to getting the project done on time within budget, and according to specification.

Ø Another Project manager:

Skilled JPP facilitators are hard to find. If the project manager is not good choice for facilitator, then the another project manager would be a good choice for facilitator, if they has experienced in JPP.

Ø JPP consultant:

 The project manager consultants will often serve as another source of qualified JPP facilitator. The project manager consulting will be invaluable. Especially in an organization that have recently completed project management training and are the process of implementing their own project management methodology.

Ø Technographer:    

The JPP facilitator is supposed by the technographer. It is an expert software tool used to support the project. The JPP technographer is recording planning decision on the computer as they occur in real time. Technographer can print out or display the plan for all to see and critique.

Ø Core project team:

  The core project team is made up of those individuals who will stay with the project form one day to last day. This does not mean that they are full time with the project. To day’s organization that is not to be expected unless the organization is totally projectized or uses self-directed team.

Ø Customer representative:

The other project managers or the importance of their participation in the meeting JPP to convince consumers or champions. It is easy, but is necessary. Customer must purchase the project plan, must be involved in the planning session.

Ø Resource manager:

 These manager control resource that the project will require. Schedule their managers put together without the input and participation will be a waste of time. Resource management is a key element in the planning process has the option of committing resources to the project.

Ø Project champion:

 The project champion drives the project and sells it to senior management. Customers can champion an ideal situation because the commitment is already there. The project champion can be the senior manager of the division, department, or process that will be the beneficiary of the project deliverables.

Ø Functional managers:

Functional managers manage areas that can either provide input to or receive output from the project deliverable. They will be ensuring that the project deliverable can be smoothly integrated into existing functions or that the functions will have to be modified as part of the project plan.

Ø Process owner:

In this the same reason that functional managers should be present, so should process owner.  If the project deliverables do not smoothly integrated into their process, either the project plan or the affected process will have to be altered.   

Facilities of JPP

In this it is important that the physical facility is comfortable and the out-site seems preferable, we prefer on site planning. The advantage of this is easy access to information to on-site planning session.

The disadvantages of this it interruptions due to the daily flow of work.

In this you need to allocate enough space so those groups of four or five planning members each have separate work areas. All work should be done in one room. Every body needs to be present every thing that takes place in the planning session.

Equipment of JPP Session

  LCD Projector and PC that you need for every one in the room for the JPP Session.

The complete planning Agenda

The Agenda for the JPP Session is straightforward. It can be completed in three sessions.

Session# 1

o   Negotiate the Conditions of satisfaction.

 Session# 2

o   Write the project Overview Statement.

Session# 3

o   Entire planning team creates the first level WBS.

o   Subject matter experts develop further decomposition with the entire planning team observing and commenting.

o   Estimate activity duration and resource requirements.

o   Construct project network diagram.

o   Determine critical path.

o   Revise and approve project completion date.

o   Finalize resource schedule.

o   Gain consensus on the project plan.

v (Second part)

Deliverables

The deliverables from the JPP session are given in the project management life cycle and have already been discussed. They are repeated here.

Ø Work breakdown structure:

   WBS is a graphical or indented outline list of the work to be done to complete the project. It is used as a planning tool as well as a reporting structure.

Ø Activity duration estimates:

     The schedule, which is also a major deliverable, is developed from estimates of the duration of each work activity in the project. Activity duration estimates may be single-point estimates or three-point estimates. Estimate activity duration, resources requirements, and cost.

Ø Resources requirements:

     For each activity in the project an estimate of the resources to perform the work is required. The resources are mostly technical, people skills, physical facilities, equipment and computer.

Ø Project network schedule:

  Using the WBS, the planning team will define the sequence in which the project activities should be performed. Initially this sequences determined only by the technical relationship between activities, not by management prerogatives. When two activities are begin at a time so it is very necessary to decode which activity will be start first.

Ø Activity schedule:

   With the sequence determined, the planning team will schedule the start and end date of each activity.

Ø Resource assignments:

  The output of the activity schedule will be the assignment of specific sources (such as skills sets) to the project activities.

Ø Project notebook:

   Project documentation happens as a natural byproduct of the project work. All that is needed is to appoint a project team member to be responsible. His or responsibilities include gathering information that is already available, putting it in a standard format, and electronically archiving it.

Project proposal

  The culmination of all the planning is the project proposal. The project proposal is the deliverable from the JPP session and is forwarded to the senior management team for approval to do the project. In addition to this information the proposal details,

1-What is to be done?

2-Who is going to do it?

3-When it is going to be done?

4-How it is going to be done?

Content of the project proposal

  Each organization will have a prescribed format for its project proposal. But most proposals will have sections similar to the ones listed hare. For project proposal is a restatement of all the planning work that has been done so for.

Ø Background:

  This brief description details the situation that led to the project proposal. It often states the business conditions, opportunities, and/or problems giving rise to the project.

Ø Objectives:

   This is another short section that gives a very general statement of what you hope to accomplish through this project. Use the language of the business, not the technical languages of your department. The objective should be clearly stated so that there is no doubt as to what is to done and what constitutes attainment of the objective.

Ø Overview of approach to be taken: 

    For those who might not be interested in the detail of how you are going to reach your objective, this section provides a high-level out line of RIA your approach. Brevity and clarity are important.

Ø Detail statement of work:

   Here is where you give the detail of your approach. Include what will be done, when it will be done. Who will do it, how much time will be required of them and what criteria will be used to measure completeness. We have found Gannet charts use full for presentation of schedule data.

Ø Time and cost  summary:

     It is our practice to include a summary page of time and cost data. This usually works best if done as a Gantt charts.