What Happen in Planning Phase in SDLC (Explained in detail!)

During the planning phase in SDLC, the primary focus is placed on the necessary project planning work. In order for an IT project to be successful, comprehensive and appropriate project planning is required. Incomplete project planning and analysis are frequently the primary factors that contribute to the failure of a project.

The planning phase in SDLC, which is often referred to as the feasibility stage, is the phase in which the developers will plan for the impending project. It is helpful in defining the problem, as well as the extent of any current systems, and determining the goals for their new systems.

If they create a detailed plan for the next development cycle, they should be able to identify potential issues well before they have an impact on the process of development. They also assist in securing the cash and resources that are necessary for them to make their strategy a reality. The project timeline is established during the planning phase in SDLC, which is potentially the most crucial aspect of this stage. This aspect can be of utmost significance if the development is for a consumer good that needs to be released onto the market by a specific date. To give a better understanding of the planning phase in SDLC, we need to understand its objectives first.

Objectives

It is recommended that a successful completion of the planning phase in SDLC include the following:

An analysis and explanation of the procurement management strategy
Development and improvement of the project scope, schedule, risk profile, and cost

Evaluation as well as a description of the activities that will be undertaken to coordinate all applicable subsidiary plans.
The procedures that will be used to define how the project will be carried out, monitored, controlled, and ultimately terminated.
Making preparations for the next step in the process

Development of the PMP (Project Management Plan)
Execution of necessary procurement tasks
Approval to move on to the phase consisting of the analysis of requirements

Goals

As the name implies, the planning phase in SDLC is used to map out every step of the project’s lifecycle, from the preliminary stages of brainstorming to the final stages of closing its doors. The government agency will do all of the necessary purchasing for the project during the requirements analysis phase.

DELIVERABLES AND APPROVALS

By providing a framework to guarantee that all aspects of the project are properly and consistently defined, planned, and communicated, SDLC deliverables aid businesses in successfully planning, executing, and controlling agency IT projects. The SDLC document templates offer a concise outline of what should be included in each document.

The creation and distribution of deliverables from the SDLC:

Make sure everyone on the planning team and in the community has the same understanding,
As projects become more complicated, they serve as a reminder of the specific plans that were developed.
Give senior management of the agency and other state officials an understanding of the risks involved in the project as well as its ongoing performance.

To encourage the execution of processes that can be repeated and are consistent,
Produce a detailed record of the performance of the project that can be used for a variety of purposes (e.g., staff knowledge transfer, budgetary and other assessment activities, lessons learned).

The Planning Team is responsible for the following during the process of developing the documentation, which is as follows:

Draft documents that are exhaustive, straightforward, and free of information that is repeated elsewhere.
Create a well-organized document repository for the essential project information so that members of the Planning Team will have an easier time accessing, storing, and referring to project documents and other deliverables from all phases of the project’s life cycle.
Establish a routine review process for deliverables in order to address issues of inaccuracy, incompleteness, and ambiguity.

It is important to be aware that sample templates for deliverables are available, and that agencies may be willing to accept deliverables in a variety of formats as long as all of the required information is included. Deliverables could be shorter or longer than expected depending on the magnitude, breadth, and level of difficulty of the project.
Reuse or cite information from earlier documents when it is advantageous to do so.

Dos and Don’ts

Don’t forget to outline your responsibilities as a vendor, agency, or government entity in order to properly identify and keep tabs on your dependencies. Without a comprehensive plan, estimating when things need to get done is difficult, which can lead to missed deadlines.

Make sure that the processes involved in a multi-release implementation are covered in each of the subsidiary plans.
Think about the internal and external factors that will have an impact on the project at every stage.

Develop the Scope Management Plan.

Both the Scope Management Plan and the milestone list are drafted by the project manager with input from the key project stakeholders. Project requirements and verification and control processes are outlined, and the project’s overall scope is briefly restated, all within the Scope Management Plan. All three of these steps—collecting requirements, verifying scope, and controlling scope—must be covered in the scope management plan.

Verify Scope – a procedure outlining the regular verification and official acceptance of different products and deliverables. The Scope Management Plan should include the following in this section:

Method for gaining formal buy-in from the project’s stakeholders on the final scope and deliverables. Acceptance testing is the process of making sure that the results of a project are satisfactory.
Methods for making regular checks on the project’s scope. This includes checking finished deliverables for accuracy.

Procedures for examining, evaluating, and testing the contractual deliverable to make sure it satisfies the set acceptance criteria

Control Scope – procedures for dealing with requests for project changes.

Procedures to guarantee that every potential change to the project’s scope is properly evaluated through the established change control process. Define procurement-related change control procedures, such as change order procedures, with the procurement officer.

Develop the Cost Management Plan.

The Cost Management Plan and the Cost Baseline are drafted by the Project Manager and the Procurement Officer. Using the initial budgetary requirements established during the Concept Development Phase as a starting point, the Project Manager then creates new budgetary requirements in order to carry out the tasks outlined in the revised timetable. A project’s costs can be planned, structured, and managed with the help of a document called the Cost Management Plan. When evaluating and controlling the success of state projects, cost estimation and cost control take precedence.

When creating the cost baseline and the cost management plan, the project manager should think about the three cost management processes outlined below. Updating cost estimates and establishing a new budget are both necessary steps in developing the cost baseline. The primary focus of the cost management plan is how expenses will be managed.

Estimate Costs – development of a detailed estimate of the amount of funding necessary to carry out all of the project’s activities, including the costs of ongoing operations, maintenance, and support for the duration of the project.

Control Costs – establishing procedures to manage the established cost baseline in order to complete the project on time and on budget These procedures help to ensure that cost expenditures do not exceed authorised funding, whether by period, deliverable, or total.

Procedures for tracking overall cost performance in order to detect and comprehend cost baseline variances
Procedures for monitoring and reporting on work performance in relation to funds spent

Describe how project managers will routinely monitor the project’s status in order to manage changes to the cost baseline.
Procedures for cost tracking and reporting are described.
Plans for conducting cost control reviews on a regular basis throughout the project’s life cycle

Cost-cutting activities must include the following:

Having an impact on the factors that cause changes to the approved cost baseline
Managing actual changes as they happen

Preventing the implementation of unapproved changes
Communicating all approved changes and associated costs to the appropriate project stakeholders.
Taking measures to reduce overrun costs to acceptable levels.

Developing the Quality Management Plan

Plan Quality – process of checking and rechecking something to make sure it’s right; used to make sure a system works as intended, that stakeholders are happy, and that a project’s results are accepted. Throughout the project, you should plan on conducting requirements traceability to guarantee that the system outcomes developed in later phases are tested to guarantee that they meet the system baseline requirements.

Determine what tasks your team will complete to prove it has met minimum standards.
Delegate the creation of future traceability acceptance criteria.

Include methods for creating test cases and performing acceptance testing.
The Planning Team’s initial strategy for migrating legacy data, and how that strategy will guarantee complete and accurate data migration should be specified for storage area network projects.
If the development team and other key stakeholders in your project don’t already possess the skills necessary to verify deliverables and create and run test scripts, you’ll need a strategy for how to get them.

Establish a connection between project deliverable requirements and acceptance standards.

Perform Quality Assurance – techniques for ensuring adherence to quality management and quality standards. To ensure optimum project performance, it is essential to develop and implement quality management methods and standards, and this part of the Quality Management Plan describes when and how the group will check in on progress and report back, as well as what measures they’ll take if any discrepancies are found.

Perform Quality Control – reviewing the quality of the system and other deliverables to ensure they meet quality criteria and standards. In this section of the QMP, we detail the processes we’ll use to assess the quality of our outputs and make adjustments where they’re needed. As part of the quality control process, the performance of the project as a whole should be watched. This includes the performance of the budget and schedule, as well as the quality of all project activities and deliverables. To guarantee quality attributes are integrated into the design and thoroughly tested across the entire life cycle, quality control activities for the system must specify the tests to be run, the resources to be used, and the outcomes that are expected. Outputs from quality inspections, inspection schedules, and quality audits are all viable options, as are bug fix logs detailing inspection errors and referencing a Requirements Traceability Matrix. Continuous testing can reveal potential problems with an application long before it is put into production.

Develop the Staffing Management Plan.

The Staffing Management Plan and Resource Calendar are drafted by the Project Manager in collaboration with the project’s most important stakeholders. Planning for Human Resource Management also establishes:

Project roles
Responsibilities

Reporting relationships

The Staffing Management Plan describes how and when human resource needs will be met, building on the preliminary organisation chart, RAM, and preliminary staffing estimates completed in the Concept Development Phase. All team members will have the following information included in their Staffing Management Plan:

Role – the roles that each team member will play in the project

Authority/Reporting – power to make decisions as it relates to a project’s funding, timeline, required approvals, and reporting structure. Teams perform at their best when members’ roles are commensurate with the level of authority they hold.
Responsibility – a list of everyone’s responsibilities in the project
Competency – the skills needed to finish the project and the amount of time and effort that can be expected to be put into it. If you notice that a member of your team doesn’t have the necessary abilities, take the initiative to address the situation. Training, hiring more workers, rearranging the schedule, and/or expanding the scope of the project are all examples of proactive responses.

Develop the Communication Management Plan.

The communication plan is made by the project manager with input from the key project stakeholders. The plan for communications is one of the most important sub-plans in the PMP. It explains the steps that need to be taken to make sure that project information is made, collected, distributed, stored, retrieved, and disposed of in a timely and correct way.

The Communication Management Plan specifies in great detail how the team intends to gather, organise, and disseminate information about the project’s development. The Communication Management Plan is often complex because it must account for the fact that a number of different stakeholder groups will need access to information about the project at various times and in various ways.

The Communication Management Plan is the first step in making sure that the stakeholders’ expectations are met. This is an important part of a project’s success. While it is ultimately the project manager’s responsibility to ensure that all communications are handled properly throughout the project, other members of the team can be tasked with helping out with the actual dissemination of information.

Components of the Communication Management Plan that are particularly important are:

• Distinguishing between various user subsets and figuring out what information each set needs

• Format, channels, and mediums for project-related messaging are outlined.

• A description of the different routes through which information is distributed

• Determination of the regularity with which information is distributed

• The responsibility for information collection and dissemination has been assigned to the Planning Team.

• The requirements for the format and information that are necessary from the team, including any future contractor personnel

• Create a plan for reporting on the performance of the project.

Collecting all of the project’s baseline data and disseminating performance information to the project’s stakeholders are both required steps in the project performance reporting process. Performance reporting usually includes information about the project’s scope, schedule, cost, quality, issues, and risks, as well as a list of activities that were finished during the reporting period, activities that were not finished and why, activities that will be done next, and a list of pending, approved, and rejected project changes (also known as status reporting).

The Importance of SDLC

SDLC provides structure to the many phases which include planning phase that are involved in the process of developing software, and it does not come to an end until all requirements and possible needs are met. The increased level of control over the development process that is made possible by employing software development life cycle is the primary benefit of using this methodology. It contributes to ensuring that the system complies with all of the requirements that have been established. However, employing SDLC does come with a few drawbacks that you should be aware of. It does not function as well in environments where there is a high amount of uncertainty or if there are excessive overhead costs. It guides the development activities while placing a strong emphasis on the planning phase in the SDLC, but it does not stimulate creative input or innovation throughout the lifespan. Because of these factors, many businesses have begun to implement incremental rather than sequential processes, such as Agile and other similar approaches.

References

https://www.google.com/url sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwimyt_Kp975AhWjT2wGHR7FCcAQFnoECCQQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fdoit.maryland.gov%2FSDLC%2FDocuments%2FSDLC%2520Phase%252003%2520Planning%2520Phase%2520Multiple%2520Hardware.pdf&usg=AOvVaw2e3H4Tc0n9F6TUSS9eFIiW
https://www.clouddefense.ai/blog/system-development-life-cycle

https://blog.testlodge.com/software-development-life-cycle/