Planning: From Result to Activity, Using Rolling Detail
What this domain tests
The Planning domain tests whether you plan from results downward rather than from activities upward, and whether you understand estimates, dependencies, decision points and re-planning. Expect questions on plan hierarchy, milestones, capacity and baselines.
Core rules
- Plan in layers: project plan (deliverables, decision points, budget, key resources) → phase plan (deliverables and activities for the phase) → detailed activity plan for the near term.
- Decompose the result into deliverables first, then into activities. An activity that produces no identifiable deliverable should be questioned.
- A milestone is a measurable state (a deliverable approved, a decision taken), not a date for an activity to be “well under way”.
- Distinguish decision points - go/no-go gates owned by the owner - from ordinary progress moments.
- Estimate with the people doing the work, record assumptions, and treat estimates as ranges with a bandwidth for uncertainty rather than as single certainties.
- Include dependencies and capacity: a plan without available people is a wish list. Check critical dependencies and allow buffer for the highest-uncertainty items.
- Re-plan when a change is approved; keep a baseline for comparison and record deviations rather than silently overwriting the plan.
Worked example
A project must deliver a data migration. The team plans “migrate data” as one activity of six weeks. Reasoning: this fails decomposition and milestone rules. The correct treatment breaks the migration into deliverables - mapping document approved, test migration completed on a copy, verification report signed off, production migration executed - each with acceptance criteria and named capacity. The dependency on the supplier’s export format becomes visible and receives buffer, and the verification report is set as the milestone before the go/no-go for cutover.
Traps that cost marks
- Activity lists with no link back to deliverables, so progress cannot be judged.
- Milestones expressed as activity progress rather than measurable results.
- Planning at full detail for the whole project while leaving the near term vague.
- Forgetting capacity, dependencies or buffer and assuming everything runs perfectly.