01 Project Planning

Before starting a project, it is necessary to make a planning of how it is going to be implemented. The planning of a project consists mainly in organizing the resources that will allow us to successfully reach the goals and objective that we have proposed ourselves.

Before putting your project idea into action, you need to develop three things to turn it into reality:

1. Identify a Need: Research together with your partner organization about the topic you want to implement the project, talk to the community or organization working on the topic to know from firsthand the troubles and needs of the area. It is also necessary who are going to be the beneficiaries of the project. This is the most important step in starting a project. If your organization doesn’t identify clearly what is the real problem and need the community/partner youth organization has, all the actions of the project would be ineffective.
   
   
   
2. Evaluation of the Project Idea: After your research, organize your information and prioritize the needs and solutions for the project. Try to propose creative, original and achievable solutions to the problems. To help you figure out if your project is going to work, make a S.W.O.T. Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats).
   
   Links:
   
   Wikipedia:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis
   
   
3. Make a Plan and a Proposal: The project proposal should contain following information:
   a. Cover Page
   b. Executive Summary
   c. Background History
   d. Justification – Why are we doing this project?
   e. Problem or Need that the Project will work on
   f. Goals, objectives and indicators
   g. Desired results
   h. Action Plan
   i. Responsible persons
   j. Resources Needed and Budget for the Activities
   k. Monitoring and Evaluation Plan
   
   

a) For project planning (action plan), the logframe tool is a very used method, oriented to reach the objectives. It should include the following:
a. General objective
b. Specific objectives
c. Activities required to achieve those objectives;
d. The resources to develop activities;
e. External constraints of the program or project;
f. Indicators and measurable objectives to evaluate the project

It uses a project table that summarizes the development of the process:

b) Another tool to plan you project is the following tool:

c) Timeline:
In order to reach the desired objectives of the project, it is also necessary to do a good planning of the activities and estimate how much time will it take to execute them. A Gantt chart is a very easy method to do this programming, which consists of giving a sequential order to the execution of the activities and assigning how much time will each require to be executed. The unit time of execution can be assigned by days, weeks or months:

Links:

http://en.kioskea.net/contents/projet/gantt.php3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart

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