Importance of Project Planning in Software Industry

It has been a very controversial discussion on importance of Project Planning in Project Development in Software Industry among my friends. Many of my friends has view that its mere time wasting in documentation rather than actual development. What all I say to them is just a saying.. "The sooner you start, the later you finish !!".. Let me explain what does it mean... If you start project without prior planning and estimation, you will face tons of obstacles and surprising risks and crisis. After huge discussion and debate finally I decided to write an article and would like to take an opportunity to share few of my thoughts about Importance of Project Planning which I realized in my project.

Project Planning process gives a significant help in your project. Even though we know lots of concepts that generally we follow while project development, but if project is not going through proper phases given by CMMi standards, many of activities that we are supposed to follow gets overlooked and later when project finds ample of surprising crisis, we find that following those processes would have really helped for betterment of project.

Project Planning is one of such process. For instance, setting milestones on project, which we as a manager generally overlook in project development. Many of us knows this concept and its usefulness in project, but as mentioned earlier when project starts directly without process following, milestones does not get setup in advance and then it becomes very tedious to trace back the tasks and its completion time versus estimated time. Project Planning process gives this power to you to plan well in advance and in turn easiness to mange the project.

External and Internal dependencies are another factors which we never think about in advance. If we are following Project Planning process and preparing its documents in advance, it will give you chance to think in deep about this area well in advance which generally person do not do when not following this process...

Risk management. This is another key aspect in project development. When project is started directly without prior preparation documents in hand, person literally think on surface level about it. Believe me, and I hope you agree with it, that each and every project has Risk associated to it and Project Planning is the document which gives you change to think about it that are going to occur in future and not on surface level. If project is following the general traditional way of development then manager never foresee those Risks in advance and hence is not well planned for any kind of un-certain disaster with project. And then obviously person heads towards applying patches and it goes on and on and on... This can be easily avoided by planning well in advance, where Project Planning Process helps you a lot...

Third party tool, Roles and Responsibilities and many more such sections from Project Planning, which gives you enough power and makes you think beyond the limit. Hence I suggest you to give proper attention towards Project Planning and filling Project Plan document for all of your projects. I realized its importance at my project hand helped me to complete my project on time.

I hope by the time you are at this point reading, you've already agreed with me and understood how project planning in project development plays vital role. Let me know your views and thoughts on this topic. I would like to discuss further and will be interested in knowing any pros that I've missed to mention or drawback of project planning if you think so.