Project planning

Project planning encompasses a wide range of activities in preparation for a project. Depending on your workplace customs and the project size, this may include scoping, budgeting, estimation, prioritization, assigning roles and responsibilities, creating timelines and roadmaps, setting milestones, and many other supporting tasks.

Regardless of what your responsibilities may be during the coming project, planning is the engineering manager’s opportunity to set expectations with their project stakeholders, contributors, and themselves. Resolving expectations early on during planning helps to avoid misunderstandings and unpleasant surprises later when the project work is underway. Inward expectations to set for yourself and your engineers are prioritization and roadmapping. Outward expectations to set for the project contributors and stakeholders are estimations and risks. In this section, we will introduce these four elements of the planning process in sequential...