About

This chapter is arguably the most important part of the project as without effective time planning and project management the project could fall behind schedule. The software chosen to aid in the planning of the project is the open source project management software tool, OpenProj; it is similar to commercial project management tools such as Microsoft Project. The tool aids in the creation of work breakdown structures and Gantt charts; this helps to plan every last detail for the whole the lifespan of the project.

Project Schedule

We start planning with the project schedule, a brief high level overview of what needs to be done by when; This information is then inserted into OpenProj which can then be broken down into easier to manage chunks, this will then become the basis for the Work breakdown structure.

Work Breakdown Structure

The work breakdown structure diagram shows how this work has been broken down into smaller distinct pieces these small pieces are then assigned their own deadlines which are then added into the spread sheet which will generate the Gantt Chart. “The breaking down of large activities into comprehensible or manageable units is a fundamental part of project management” (Maylor, 2005)

Gantt Chart

The Gantt chart shows each task as its own bar within the chart, this makes it easy to see which tasks run in parallel as the bars overlap when tasks run at the same time.

Summary

The initial planning was conducted at the very beginning of the project to ensure the time allocated is well used. The project time planning aspect of the project also added in extra time to each task as "Slack" just in case any of the tasks overrun the allotted time; this allows for a little leeway if the specific task requires more time.

In the next chapter we will be looking at the research that will need to be undertaken to complete the project successfully.