Anticlue

Understanding the project plan

I have a problem, it has to do with audience and the understanding of a project plan. It’s a complicated plan, we are basically phasing out one system, replacing a new system, and adding 3 departments to the new system with new applications, new workflow, and new billing and decision support interfaces. Complicated project, Complicated project plan. My organization is new to understanding things as projects.

I’ve been using MS Project and it seems to work well for me, but the project team, and the business leadership group aren’t embracing it. My co-PM, the business PM, wants to get the project plan into excel for the team leads. It’s a 26 page project plan in project, and I believe a lot of interdependencies will be lost in just showing the team leads the task list in excel. I’ve printed the PERT chart out of project on plotter, and once again everyone was scared by the amount of work. I did an overview, high level roll up and again why so long?

I need to get the audience to understand the project plan, and the amount of work effort needed to complete it. They also need to have a sense of ownership for the project plan. (Especially since they will be doing a lot of the work, and they already have fulltime jobs) Anyone have any ideas?