Planning: scope, WBS, schedule, estimates and budget

Scope

Define what's in and out of scope, deliverables and acceptance criteria. Uncontrolled additions ("scope creep") are a top cause of project failure. Changes go through change control: assess impact on time, cost and quality, then approve or reject.

Work breakdown structure (WBS)

Break the project into deliverables, then into smaller work packages that can be estimated, assigned and tracked.

1. Campus hiring drive
   1.1 Planning: budget, dates, colleges shortlisted
   1.2 Employer outreach: invite list, confirmations, job descriptions collected
   1.3 Student registration: portal setup, communication, eligibility checks
   1.4 Assessments: test design, platform, scoring
   1.5 Interview day: rooms, schedule, panels, logistics
   1.6 Offers and reporting: offer letters, placement report

Estimating

• Expert judgement and analogous estimates (based on similar past work).
• Three-point (PERT): (optimistic + 4 × most likely + pessimistic) ÷ 6. Example: 4, 6 and 14 days → (4 + 24 + 14) ÷ 6 = 7 days.
• Bottom-up: estimate each work package and add up.
• Agile teams use story points (relative effort) and velocity (points completed per sprint) to forecast.

Always include buffers for risk, and involve the people doing the work in estimating.

Scheduling

• Identify dependencies (finish-to-start is most common: you can't test before you build).
• Build a network diagram and find the critical path: the longest chain of dependent tasks, which determines the minimum project duration. Any delay on it delays the project; other tasks have float (slack).
• Visualise with a Gantt chart; set milestones.
• Compress schedules by crashing (adding resources to critical tasks, at a cost) or fast-tracking (doing tasks in parallel, with more risk).

Resources and budget

Assign people by skills and availability, watch for over-allocation, and build a budget from estimates plus contingency reserves. Track actual vs planned spend.

Check yourself

• Calculate a PERT estimate for 2, 5 and 14 days.
• What is the critical path and why does it matter?
• How would you handle a stakeholder adding "one small feature" late in the project?