Complete guide to plan for an IT project

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Note from Author (Abhishek Rout): Hello coders! This article is inspired from details and information given by an industrial expert during an industrial visit. The following content is an experience which i gain in an industrial visit.

What is Planning?

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Planning is the process of thinking about the activities required to achieve a desired goal. It is the first and foremost activity to achieve desired result. It involves the creation and maintenance of a plan, such as psychological aspects that require conceptual skills.

For example, let’s say your goal is to buy a gallon of milk. It may sound like a simple task, but if you break it down, there are many small tasks involved: obtain keys, obtain wallet, start car, drive to store, find and obtain milk, purchase milk, etc.

From example we can get that each and every step is important in the planning.

Steps to do when you plan for a project:

Planning for a project is a multi-step process which includes requirement analysis and visualizing your project steps and making your project easy to understand. Steps are:

1. Think of your project’s requirements:

Requirements include efforts, time and cost required by the project.

Efforts: Efforts is the number of hours required by the developer/programmer for development of project program/software.

Time: Time is the number of developers required as the number of developers working on the project increase the time required for development decrease.

Cost: Cost is the product of number of hour and cost of per hour of developer.

These factors give you an estimate of total time required i.e. (time required for development) + (excess time for testing and redevelopment).

2. Design of project requirements:

Designing contains the visualization i.e. making grids and mind mapping of your project and picturing your design via various tools.

It includes various designs:

Links for applications: draw.io, dbdiagram.io.

Code Structure: Your code design should be divided into packages i.e. small bunch of code segments like functions. This gives you an advantage in maintaining your code/program i.e. it makes easier for you to search bugs, defects or errors while working on your project’s code. Also code structuring makes code handling and changing easier.

Sprints: Sprints is a group of modules or a document giving you an idea about the steps going on while development. This module keeps the team connected, gives them idea about which task is to be performed next.

Application used:

1. MS Excel(freely available and shareable).
2. Bitrix(places a complete set of business tools into a single, intuitive interface)
3. Kanban(task/workflow management method designed to help you visualize your work, maximize efficiency and be agile).
4. Gantt(a Gantt chart is a type of bar chart that illustrates a project schedule)

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In the next article, we are going to discuss about actual execution of the plans. The next article is coming soon…