How to Create a Rough Project Plan: Step-by-Step Guide to Effective Project Planning

• Why Good Planning Is the Key to Project Success
• The Onion Problem: Why Spontaneous Actions Often Backfire
• How to Avoid the Onion Problem
• How to Create an Appropriate Plan
• Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Your Project Plan
  • 1. Break Down Your Goal into Sub-Goals
  • 2. Arrange the Tasks Logically
  • 3. Check Your Understanding of the Tasks
  • 4. Decide on Resource Allocation
• Summary

Welcome to the second part of our series!
Today, we'll show you how to turn a simple goal into a clear roadmap. Discover why thoughtful planning is essential and how you can achieve it step by step.

Why Good Planning Is the Key to Project Success

Just like in goal setting, project planning is about using your resources wisely — efficiently and effectively (see Defining Goals). At first glance, detailed planning might seem like extra effort. Maybe you already have numerous ideas swirling in your head about how to achieve your goal. That's great! But if you just dive in, you risk falling into the notorious onion problem.

The Onion Problem: Why Spontaneous Actions Often Backfire

Projects can be divided into different phases. According to A. Hemmrich, these are the Definition Phase, Planning Phase, Realization Phase, and Implementation Phase. There are, of course, numerous other models and approaches, but the core point remains the same: if you invest too little time in the first two phases — the definition and planning — you'll have to expend more resources in the later phases.

Hemmrich illustrates this with a pyramid: you start at the top and work your way down, with the phases becoming increasingly effortful. If you neglect the upper levels, the pyramid turns into an onion — the effort balloons, deadlines are missed, and resources are used inefficiently.

The Project Onion – Avoid Common Mistakes in Project Planning

How to Avoid the Onion Problem

Simply put, there are three essential steps to circumvent the onion problem:

1. Define Clear Goals: Think carefully about what you want to achieve (see Defining Goals).

2. Create an Appropriate Project Plan: Develop a sensible plan for your task.

3. Stay Flexible: Stick to your plan but be ready to adjust it if necessary.

From personal experience, I can say: when I started in project management, I invested an enormous amount of time in planning. That's fundamentally positive, but there's a "but." It's about finding the right balance — the optimum. As the graphic above shows, if you spend too much time in goal definition and planning, the sleek pyramid can turn into a bulky block. That's something we want to avoid as well.

Another reason why comprehensive detailed planning at the beginning of a project can be disadvantageous lies in uncertainty. Often, it's not yet clear what the end goal should look like exactly — which functions are truly necessary, which requirements need to be prioritized. Additionally, estimates of effort and duration are often inaccurate at this early stage. To deal with these uncertainties, there are agile methods, which we will explain in detail in a later article. Too early detailed planning often leads to the plan having to be constantly adjusted, which is inefficient. Therefore, we do not recommend detailed planning at this point.

How to Create an Appropriate Plan

To understand what an "appropriate" plan is, we should first ask what the goals of project planning are. As mentioned, it's about using resources efficiently and effectively. This means neither working on irrelevant tasks nor investing more resources in certain areas than necessary for achieving the goal.

An appropriate project plan gives you clarity about what you work on, when, and what outcome you aim for. At this point, we deliberately avoid considering the time effort of each task. For now, we focus on the work steps and the desired results.

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Your Project Plan

1. Break Down Your Goal into Sub-Goals

Start with your main goal and identify the necessary intermediate results to achieve it. Think of it like a recipe: to bake a pizza, you need dough, sauce, and toppings. Each of these elements is an intermediate goal. Break down each intermediate goal further into concrete steps. This way, you turn a big goal into many small, manageable tasks.

2. Arrange the Tasks Logically

Put the tasks in a sensible order. It would be pointless to bake the pizza before you've prepared the toppings.

3. Check Your Understanding of the Tasks

Consider whether you fully understand each task. Try to roughly estimate the effort for each step. It's not about exact numbers but about determining whether you've broken down the task enough to make it manageable. If you can't estimate how much effort a task requires, break it down further into smaller steps.

4. Decide on Resource Allocation

Think about which tasks you want to do yourself, which you can delegate, and where it makes sense to use ready-made solutions. Plan how to use your resources most effectively.

Note on step 3: There are various methods for effort estimation, which we'll cover in a later article. For now, just focus on whether you understand the task comprehensively enough to roughly estimate its effort. Always remember: the goal of your planning is to identify and understand the necessary steps that will lead you to your goal.

Practical Example: Mia's Path to a Rough Plan

To transfer theory into practice, let's look at Mia's example. In the last article, Mia defined her goal: she wants to develop a video chat application. Now she begins with the rough planning.

With her goal definition in mind, she first thinks about sub-goals:

1. Building the Infrastructure:

• Setting up servers
• enabling communication between clients
• ...

2. Developing the Program:

• Designing the user interface
• programming background services
• ...

3. Defining and Writing Software Tests
4. Marketing: Although she doesn't want to handle this area herself, she plans the work package "finding a collaborator."

In the other areas, she begins to further subdivide the sub-goals.

Mia decides to design the user interface as a Single Page Application (SPA). The services should run in containers. She needs a code repository for her code, a CI pipeline for the containers, and has to take care of container hosting. With that, she has already identified some rough work areas for the infrastructure part. For the moment, that's sufficient for her to understand what needs to be done in each area. However, she plans to break down her sub-goals one or two levels deeper.

When it comes to the sub-goal "defining tests," Mia thinks of tests for the user interface, the background services, and the infrastructure. She briefly estimates how many tests might be required in each area and notes this information.

As the next step, Mia plans a detailed approach for the user interface and the background services. She wants to use a method she knows from her work: "Event Storming." (More on this in a later article.)

Mia thinks through her sub-goals and tasks and now has a clear picture of what needs to be done in each area. It's easy for her to arrange the work packages in a logical order and to roughly estimate the effort. But before she continues with that, she wants to take care of finding a collaborator. More on that in the next article.

Summary

By creating a clear rough plan, you're laying the foundation for the success of your project. You now know how to break down your goals into manageable steps and use your resources efficiently. In the next article, we'll dive deeper into detailed planning and see how you can further refine your plan.

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Note: This article is part of our series on effective goal setting and project planning. Check out our other posts to learn more about project management, process optimization, and self-organization.

Do you have questions about creating a rough planning or want to share your experiences? Leave a comment or discuss with us on X or LinkedIn!