In most organizations when a new project is about to get underway whether internal or with an outside vendor the first question asked is, “Do you have a project plan yet?” While the project plan is a valuable document in the project manager’s tool kit, it’s not the only one. Prior to building a stable and workable project plan, the project manager needs to work with stakeholders, possible team members, vendor(s), ancillary resources, and resource managers to define the project as whole and how it aligns to the organization’s goals.
The need to identify core project resources can be a large challenge initally. Understanding existing time commitments to daily work tasks and existing project work allows the project manager to better plan on how/when the core team will be allocated to best use the needed resources.
The Core Team should be made up of project leads and core team members. Project leads should be comprised of departmental managers impacted by the new project and the core team members will be executing on the plan (once completed) with input from the leads.
