Planning

There are many processes that occur in planning to produce a comprehensive project-management plan and necessary project documents. You have reviewed many of the baselines and subsidiary management plans at a high level in Chapter 3, Project Roles and Responsibilities. You reviewed how comprehensive how-to guides may be necessary for each knowledge area as well as specific baselines to track performance.

It takes work to produce an integrated project-management plan, but there are also a variety of living, breathing project documents that you will create and update on a regular basis. These do not need formal approval for changes. If you had to get formal authorization every time you added a new issue to the issue log, that would be all you ever did: Hello, change-control board, I'm back again for the 85th time today! That would be an outrageous waste of time. We'll visit the CCB when requirements for scope, time, cost, or quality need to change rather than for day-to-day updates that help us keep track of performance.

The list of project documents is not exhaustive because your needs will depend on the project.

You will review the following documents in later chapters:

• Risk register
• Issue log
• Activity lists
• Schedule (not the schedule baseline)
• Budget (not the cost baseline)
• Resource calendars
• Resource assignments
• Stakeholder matrix