Project Planning Overview
A Vision project plan is an outline for organizing work and associated costs. In Project Planning, you can develop full plans for opportunities or projects, create new plans, clone and modify existing plans, and run hypothetical project scenarios.
Typically, you use a plan to map out a project, but Vision planning is flexible enough to support a wide range of plans for varying purposes.
Your plans can include:
- Work breakdown structure elements — You can set up the elements you need to plan your work. These elements may be projects, phases, and tasks, but need not be.
- Schedule — You can establish the anticipated life cycle for the plan, from start date to end date.
- Resource assignments and budgeted costs — You can use the Resource Management feature to assign resources to the various work elements for your plan.
- Financial analysis and forecasts — You can view a summary of the plan's financial performance.
- Gantt Charts — You can refer to these simple, time-based bar charts to view the time frame and effort of a project, phase, task, or resource assignment.
Steps to Create a Plan
The basic steps for creating a plan are:
- Create a plan record.
- Create the WBS for the plan.
- Schedule the plan
- Budget the plan by assigning resources, expenses, and/or consultants.
- Optional: Map the plan to Info Center records.
- Save the baseline version of the plan when the client signs the contract.
Work Breakdown Structure
One of the key pieces of your plan is the work breakdown structure (WBS). A work breakdown structure is an organization and numbering tool, a "skeleton" structure or framework.
Vision has two different types of work breakdown structures:
- The Project Info Center WBS
- An individual plan's WBS
Report Actual Hours and Costs
Vision lets you choose whether your plan's data is going to "map" to the Vision Accounting and Info Center applications. In mapping a plan, you integrate its elements with your Project Info Center WBS project, phase, and task records. This allows Vision to report actual hours and actual costs associated with your plan.
Mapping Options
When you map a plan to an existing project, you simply map parts of the plan to specific parts of the project.
However, when you map a plan to a new (not yet created) project record in the Project Info Center, you can copy the plan's existing mapped work breakdown structure into a project record.
You can also decide whether or not your plan's data is going to "map" to the Vision Accounting and Info Center applications.
The Project Info Center supports work breakdown structures of up to three levels, for projects, phases, and tasks.
Planning does not limit the number of WBS levels, as the Project Info Center does. However, if you intend to map a plan's WBS elements to the Project Info Center WBS, you must follow the Project Info Center WBS guidelines and use no more than three levels. Vision does not support the reporting of actual hours and costs for any elements below the third level of the WBS in a mapped plan.
If you decide not to map a plan's WBS elements to the Info Center records, you can create any number of levels in your plan's WBS.
Cost Rates and Billing Rates
You can use cost rates, billing rates, or both in your plans:
- Cost amounts, whether budgeted or actual, refer to your firm's cost to produce a service. The cost rates are the rates at which you want to distribute cost amounts, such as the cost of employee labor hours, to projects.
- Billing rates are the rates at which you bill services to your clients. Typically, billing rates are based upon cost rates but also include markups to cover overhead costs.
- You may find that including both cost and billing budgets with certain plans is a good approach, since doing so makes it possible to use the budgets for different purposes, some internal to your firm and some specific to client presentations or communications.