Planning Phase

These Project Planning Templates provide you with all of the project planning documents you need to plan projects. Every project planning template has been pre-formatted and already includes the sections, tables and practical examples you need.

Project Planning Kit

The Project Planning Phase is the second phase in the Project Management Life Cycle. It involves creating of a set of plans to help guide your team through the execution and closure phases of the project.

The plans created during this phase will help you to manage time, cost, quality, change, risk and issues. They will also help you manage staff and external suppliers, to ensure that you deliver the project on time and within budget.

There are 10 Project Planning steps you need to take to complete the Project Planning Phase efficiently. These steps and the templates needed to perform them, are shown in the following diagram.

Project Plan

Create a comprehensive Project Plan quickly and easily using this Project Planning template. You can identify the Work Breakdown Structure, effort and resources for your project, as well as see a complete worked example of a project schedule to help you along the way.

Resource Plan

This Resource Planning template will help you identify and schedule the resources required to complete your project. The Resource Schedule table will help you determine when Labor, Equipment and Materials are needed, while the Resource Usage table will enable you to identify the activity that the resource should be assigned to.

Financial Plan

Identifying the quantity of financial expenditure required for your project can be challenging. By using this project planning template, you will be able to list every item of planned expenditure including labor, equipment, materials, administration and other costs. You will then be shown how to schedule the expenditure and identify the total cost of the project per activity.

Quality Plan

It's hard to measure quality at the best of times. This comprehensive project planning template describes what quality means, how to set quality targets, quality standards and criteria. It then describes in detail how to create Quality Assurance and Quality Control plans to raise the level of quality on your project.

Risk Plan

Identifying potential risks early within your project is critical to achieving success. This project planning template describes in depth, how to identify and quantify typical project risks using a broad suite of practical examples. After you have rated the Likelihood, Impact and Priority of each risk, you will create a set of preventative and contingent actions needed to reduce the likelihood of the risk occurring. By using this Risk Plan, you can identify 90% of typical project risks up-front, substantially increasing your chances of success.

Acceptance Plan

To deliver a winning project, you must gain the full acceptance of the customer for the deliverables produced by the project. To do this, you need to create an Acceptance Plan which defines the milestones and criteria for acceptance and a schedule of Acceptance Reviews. This project planning template will help you gain customer acceptance for every deliverable within a project.

Communication Plan

Communicating is easy, right? If so, then why is it one of the most common reasons for project failure? To communicate properly, you need to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time. Using this project planning template, you can list the communication stakeholders, identify their information needs and create a complete schedule for delivering project information to them in a timely manner.

Procurement Plan

Outsourcing to external suppliers is often a risky activity. To succeed, you need to create a detailed Procurement Plan which lists the requirements for external goods and services, the reason for outsourcing them and your plan for acquiring them for your project. You will also need to describe the Tender Process to ensure that the suppliers and products are chosen fairly and accurately. This project planning template helps you to do all of this, by describing the procedures required at each step in the process.

Communication Plan

Tender Management Plan

Having identified your plan for procurement, you now need to define the Tender Management Process. This process describes how potential suppliers are identified, evaluated and selected for the supply of products to the project. This project planning template takes you through the tender process and also describes the roles and responsibilities of those taking part.

Tender Management Plan

Statement of Work (SOW)

The first step in any Tender Process involves the creation of a Statement of Work (SOW) which describes the procurement requirements of the project. This project planning template helps you specify the type of suppliers, products, training, documentation and support required from outside of the project. It also identifies the materials, equipment and deliverables to be provided by each supplier.

Request For Information

A Request for Information (RFI) is a document which is issued by the project team to a wide group of potential suppliers to enable them to register an interest in becoming a preferred supplier for the project. To enable suppliers to formally register their interest, they must provide information regarding their Company, product offering and approach towards satisfying the needs of the project. This typically complex document is made simple using the Request for Information project planning template.

Request For Proposal

Use this project planning template to complete a Request for Proposal (RFP). A RFP is typically sent to a select group of suppliers to allow them to submit a formal proposal for the supply of goods and services to the project. Creating a RFP can be a time consuming task, however this template will help you to specify the format, timeframes and submission guidelines for the RFP within no time at all.

Tender Management Plan

Supplier Contract

You don't need a degree in Law to create a bullet-proof Supplier Contract for your project. By using this comprehensive project planning template, you can define the contractual deliverables, responsibilities, performance criteria and pricing to ensure that you get the most out of your supplier relationship.

Tender Register

It's important that you record the status of the tender activities within a Tender Register. This register enables you to monitor and control the process of releasing a SOW, RFI and RFP and creating a supplier contract. This simple yet effective project planning register will help you to keep track of where you are in the tender process and never miss a step.

Phase Review Form (Planning)

At the end of the Planning Phase, you need to review the performance of the project to date. Use this project planning form to assess the current status of the Project Schedule, Expenses, Staffing, Deliverables, Risks and Issues for your project.