Planning The project’s stages

4.3 Project planning 65 For each of the objectives you identify in your project you should apply these criteria to ensure that those objectives are clearly defined. For example, take Objective 1 from our example project:

1. Complete a literature search and literature review of existing stock market prediction

techniques. Applying the SMART criteria: n Is this specific? Does this provide us with enough idea of what we should be doing? Yes n Is it measurable? How can we measure progress on this objective? How will we know when the objective is completed? How much literature must we access in order to conclude that the literature search is complete? Probably not n Is it appropriate? Is it an appropriate objective to have, bearing in mind the long term goal of our project? Yes n Is it realistic? In the time we have available can we realistically expect to complete this task? Probably – although until we start this task we won’t know how much work we will need to do on it n Is it time-related? Have we identified how long the task will take and when we expect to complete it by? We don’t know yet but we will attempt to pin this down during project planning According to SMART, the problems we have with this objective at the moment are that it is not clearly measurable and we don’t know how long it will take. Because of the nature of this objective we may well have to accept this as it stands. It is difficult to know how long a literature search will take as the search usually ‘snowballs’ as it continues. Our best approach will be to allocate a specific amount of time to this objective and draw a line underneath it at that point – on the understanding that we have done the best we can in the time available. However, until we complete our project planning, discussed in the following section, we don’t know how long to allocate for this objective so we shall leave it open-ended for now. •

4.3 Project planning

Although you are now clear about what you intend to achieve with your project, what you must now do is identify the work you need to do in order to fulfil these aims. Project planning assists you by identifying the work you need to perform, clarifying the order in which you should tackle the work, and revealing how long you need to do it. It is at this point that you may realise that your project is either overly complex or of insufficient depth for the requirements of your course. You may then decide to redefine your project expanding or reducing its scope before re-planning your work once more. Project planning is performed through a series of six steps that utilise a number of project management techniques:

1. Work breakdown

2. Time estimates