Strawman Project Plan: An Example

Following up on the last post, “Project Planning: Creating a Strawman Plan”, let’s dive in a little closer using our ongoing example project of installing wireless at the church coffee bar. We know that we have these 3 milestones to schedule: Basic Wireless, Content Filtering, and Staff Support. Rough estimates indicate that our volunteer resources should be able to tackle each item at a month each. This gives the team enough time for researching the right products, performing any prep tasks, getting things setup, and documenting the configuration steps taken. At each stage, we’ll also conduct an acceptance test, where we verify the success criteria of each milestone. Here is what our project plan looks like on a Gantt chart (click on the image to zoom in):

Remember, this is just a strawman project plan and does not include anything other than high-level requirements given to us by stakeholders. We’ll dive deeper into requirements gathering process, as well as recruiting for your project and managing the project to the plan, in future posts. What this strawman offers us is a chance to communicate our first guess of a project timeline to all of those involved, determine overlap of the project with other projects within the ministry and church, and to verify that the most basic of stakeholder needs are understood by you. Finally, this level of a plan should never be used to hold people accountable (you or your team), only a rough estimate.

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