Owner's Project Planning: The Process Approach

Project planning is the bridge between ideas and execution. The planning of capital investment projects is a continuous process, which progresses from feasibility studies, to preliminary planning and lastly to detailed planning. Our focus in this study is on the preliminary planning stage.

Search in the literature concerning planning shows that formal planning was first introduced by the military. Current literature deals mainly with the following types of planning:

• Economic and social planning
• Urban community planning
• Corporate strategic planning
• Project planning (from the owner’s point of view)
• Construction planning (from the constructor's point of view)
• Routine tactical/operational planning

Of this list only routine tactical/operational planning can claim significant achievements. Recent studies concerning the first three types of planning indicate that the extensive research and developments efforts invested in them during the last several decades have yielded meager achievements. Many practitioners and scholars go as far as applying terms such as crisis and bankruptcy when describing the current state of these planning systems.

The state and achievements of construction planning was recently examined in several studies conducted by the author with the conclusion that construction planning is plagued by numerous fundamental problems.

Project planning, especially from the owner’s point of view, is a relatively new field. After more than a decade of intensive development it is still difficult to point at significant progress in the understanding of planning principles. Most studies have focused on normative techniques of planning and control namely, how project managers should plan; this in spite of the fact that we lack an accepted definition for effective planning and that we neither know how to measure nor how to achieve it. We assert that before you prescribe how project managers should plan you must have a sound understanding of how they actually do plan. The premise of this study is that a change must be brought about in the approach to project planning research by shifting the focus from planning techniques per se to the process of planning as a whole.

The Project Organization Task Force took upon itself to turn its attention to the subject of project planning. The objective is to learn about both the process of planning and the product of planning (the plans) as instruments that facilitate and improve the execution of the project. The current study concentrates more on the process aspects of planning utilizing two different sources of data:

• Review of current practices based on a comprehensive literature survey, and interaction with several CII member companies. Also included is a tentative list of principles of project planning (described in Chapter II).
• Basic study of decision making processes – involvement, intensity, and path of progress – in different areas of project planning. Data gathered from 37 individuals affiliated with 11 CII member companies (described in Chapter III).

Another current study of the Task Force reviews systems and procedures used by CII member companies as described in their respective project manuals. A previous study by the Task Force addressed the issue of project objectives (compatibility and communication).