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In today’s project management world, it’s easy to get caught up in the tactics and the nitty gritty when you don’t have a project plan in place. Scope creep, indecisive stakeholders and over allocation of resources are all factors that can make your project go awry and blow your spending budget. If you’re like me, you know the damaging impact it can have on your project, your team and the criteria that defines success in your completed project. Whether or not you’re practicing waterfall, agile, scrum – or no methodology at all, you should be ready to stare down your project and your team, and take the reins to project success.

Putting together a project plan is no easy task. In fact, it’s laborious and time-consuming. However, the benefits yield unspeakable results. Mapping out your project and communicating clear goals provide common ground for your team to understand the purpose and how each task maps back to the objectives and timeline of the project. It prepares your team for both the known and unknown risks associated within each phase of the project, so you can prepare your next move.

The purpose for creating a project plan is to gain deeper insight and understanding of the customer and what their goals and values are for the outcome of their project. In doing so, it is not only your job to know what they want, but to really harness what they need. Thus, project managers need to consider these four areas:

Key milestones and tasks

What are the phases in your project? There are generally five phases within project management (Initiation, Planning, Execution, Monitoring and Controlling, Close) and they vary depending on the type, scale and duration of a project. What are the phases that define your project and the steps you’ll take to move your project towards completion?

What are the key milestones and tasks within each of those phases? Within the planning phase, you should be raising questions to your project team, stakeholders and customers that outline and define the key actions, and roles and responsibilities for your team. What are they and how do they align with the customer’s expectations for this project?

What are the assumptions and constraints? You may already be anticipating problems or encountering hiccups along the way that might offset your project. Make sure you identify any potential gaps by calling out these obstacles or constraints and create a workaround plan that can steer your project forward.

What does success look like?

What does success look like? The definition for measuring the success of your project for your customer and your project team may have a similar end result, but can significantly differ with each deliverable. You should have an idea of what criteria defines success for your customer and your project team along with the overall acceptance criteria for the project at its stage of completion.

Examining these four areas within your project plan will not only help you succeed in achieving your end goal, but ultimately, it will help you better understand your customer by delivering not only what your customer wants but what your customer really needs.