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Unit 3: Project Planning

The Planning Cycle brings together all aspects of planning into a coherent, unified process. Notes

By planning within this structure, you will help to ensure that your plans are fully considered,
well focused, resilient, practical and cost-effective. You will also ensure that you learn from any
mistakes you make, and feed this back into future planning and Decision-making.
Planning using this cycle will help you to plan and manage ongoing projects up to a certain level
of complexity – this will depend on the circumstance. For projects involving many people over
a long period of time, more formal methodologies and approaches are necessary.

How to use the Tool?

It is best to think of planning as a cycle, not a straight-through process.
Once you have devised a plan you should evaluate whether it is likely to succeed. This evaluation
may be cost or number based, or may use other analytical tools. This analysis may show that
your plan may cause unwanted consequences, may cost too much, or may simply not work.
In this case you should cycle back to an earlier stage. Alternatively you may have to abandon the
plan altogether – the outcome of the planning process may be that it is best to do nothing!
Finally, you should feed back what you have learned with one plan into the next.
The Planning Cycle is shown in figure 3.3.

Figure 3.3: The Planning Cycle

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