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Detailed planning – Initial estimation - High level plan (1st)

High level plan (first review)

This example is based upon personnel resource, but other costs e.g. equipment and facilities, could be treated in the same manner.

In order to make an assessment of the costs firstly you will need to examine the major activities in the schedule. At this stage you must resist the temptation to start to delve too deeply and begin to seek too much detail.

In order to aid this process, the major blocks of activity could be listed followed by consideration of any dependencies. The depth of the resulting block diagram will depend upon the number of dependencies, the number of tasks running in parallel and major activity levels identified.

In the example shown below the tasks are labelled ‘A’ to ‘J’ which are shown progressing over a period of 12 (could be weeks or months). Note that the tasks ‘C’, ‘E’ and ‘G’ are running in parallel with tasks ‘B’, ‘D’ and ‘F’. Listed vertically are the various types of resource that have been identified, which for this example are:

  • Internal
  • External
  • Business

Each of these resources are then estimated for the tasks in a single period. These can then be totalled for each period and overall for each of the resource groups. There is no need at this stage to use any specialised software, although it makes the calculations easier.

There is no cost involved at this stage purely a level of personnel needed.

The level of resource required for each period is then assessed. The diagram below shows a ‘first review’.

Business resource tends to be any resource that the project requires to function that is not naturally represented at project team meetings for example, project office resource or secretarial skills.

High levelHigh level large

Next will be the ‘second review’.