That’s the Project Plan – a comprehensive list of tasks with estimated work-units for each. I keep the list in a spreadsheet, which I share with the project team. Adding, modifying or subtracting tasks is lightweight, making it easy to update the project as we go along
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In my company, we have a major update and review of the Project Plan before we move from one project phase to the next.
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You’ll make your QA team proud if you use the planning process to think about timing and content of design reviews. Incorporate design reviews into the Project Plan now, so that you can account for the capacity required, and you don’t accidentally skip an important review in the heat of the project later.
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By summing the estimated work-units for all the tasks in a project, we calculate the total work-units required to complete the project. We call this the Project Scope. More work-units means a bigger Project Scope. Pretty straightforward. If we separated out the task lists for each phase in our stage-gate, we can calculate Phase Scopes.
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We can also calculate Weekly Project Capacity. We simply add up the realistic amount of work-days available from the people that will work on the project each week. I assume 3.5 to 4 work-days available per person per week, because I know people need to attend meetings, attend training, work on non-NPD tasks, etc. If someone on my team is managing an outside resource, I make sure I include adequate tasks in the plan for the effort to manage the outside resource, so I’m comparing apples to apples.
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Now we can calculate Project Duration, by dividing Project Scope by Weekly Project Capacity. This tells us the number of weeks our project will take, given the current scope and capacity. Notice that we haven’t assigned individuals to specific tasks and done standard resource leveling. I assume that people have breadth, so that more than one person could tackle any given task.  We’ll figure out who does what later. I can also calculate Phase Duration, to estimate how long the current phase will take.
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Critical Action Planning: A hybrid of Critical Chain and Agile/Kanban Project Management for Medtech and other hardware companies.
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Project Plan: A comprehensive, detailed list of all tasks needed to complete the project (including some assumed tasks for rework and iteration) with work-unit estimates for each.
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Project Task: unambiguous definition of a piece of work to be done, starting with an action verb and clearly defining the deliverable.
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Work-units: best-case estimate of the total amount of project team effort (e.g. in person-days) needed to complete a task.
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Project Scope: the sum of work-units required to complete all tasks in the project plan.
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Phase Scope: the sum of work-units required to complete all tasks in a phase of the stage-gate process.
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Weekly Project Capacity: the realistic work-units available from project resources (can be team members or outside resources) for one week.
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Project Duration: Project scope divided by project capacity.
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