Sample Budgets and Project Plans
Overview
At this point in the process, you and your team will begin to assemble your budget and project plan. Preview each step of the process by clicking through the deck below. Keep this information in mind as you start to craft your project plan.
Project Plans
The project plan is a document that serves as an implementation guide for a project. It is critical to your success. A well written plan provides stakeholders and the project team a roadmap that shows the project phases, key activities, expected deliverables, dependencies, and milestones.
Refer to the Data Ready Project Plan Template in your resource file for a suggested structure for your project plan. When building your project plan, take these tips into consideration:
Purpose
This section of a project plan is to provide an overview of the project and the challenge it aims to resolve.
Objectives
The objectives section is where you get into more specifics about the outcomes of the project.
- For instance, the purpose section might include something like: “District seeks to develop and implement an Ed-Fi Operational Data Store (ODS), Dashboards, and Reports.” This section will take that a step further and detail specific objectives and outcomes like this:
- District data will be housed in an Ed-Fi ODS to unify disparate data in a common language (Ed-Fi) to allow for standardization.
- Teachers will have access to a single, easy-to-use dashboard that visualizes student performance and outcomes in real-time, allowing them to create timely interventions for students.
- Documenting project objectives here helps to maintain the project focus on what needs to be achieved to complete this project successfully.
Scope
The scope section of a project plan is a critical piece that will be used by stakeholders and development teams alike. Take the time to detail exactly what is to be delivered by the project team. For each phase of work, describe the deliverables that are in scope.
Success Criteria
While the success criteria of a project seems like a very straightforward topic, there is some nuance to defining success. While defining success criteria, certainly include completion and delivery of technical tasks, but also focus on the outcomes you hope to achieve with this project. Sometimes a project can complete with all technical goals met, but fall short of achieving the stated outcomes. At the beginning of a project, teams proceed with the best available information and plans, but additional discovery often leads projects in an alternate direction. So, be sure to measure your success by achieving those outcomes and goals you have for the project in addition to technical completion of work. You may take a different route to get through those outcomes, and the project can still be considered a success.
Assumptions
Documenting the assumptions the district made in creating the project plan, documenting deliverables and timelines, and creating a budget is an important part of the project plan. Identify the dependencies on people, systems, and phases of the project to help recognize the potential pain points of your project and to help those stewards and team members realize how important their timely attention to their work is for the project.
Budget
When documenting the budget in a project plan, you should provide a general overview of the costs associated with each phase. Ideally the project plan will not be a highly detailed breakdown of costs. Generally the project plan budget section is used to identify how much money or percentage of the budget is associated with each phase of work.
Project Budgets
Creating a detailed project budget is an important part of getting a project approved by districts or to get agreement with vendors on a contract. Generally project budgets are created by breaking down the work effort for each phase of work and considering the billing rate of the team members performing the work. A simple compilation of the total dollars associated for each work phase gives you a look at the general cost of the project, but there is more to consider to ensure your budget is accurate.
Creating an accurate and realistic budget does rely on a deep look at each phase of work to create a work breakdown structure to identify all the elements that go into accomplishing each phase. However, beyond the estimates for delivering the work are several areas to keep in mind that often go overlooked. Those include:
Costs of infrastructure and tooling
- Applies to most implementations
- Hours to deploy the infrastructure for your project
- Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) tools (build and deploy)
- Software licensing costs
- Additional for cloud-based implementations
- Ongoing cloud environment subscriptions
- Additional for on-premise solutions
- Server hardware costs
- Ongoing maintenance cost of servers or data center
- Testing budget should be included for each phase of work. This seems obvious but is often missed when projecting project costs
- If your project team is not internal, consider whether you want them to come onsite for meetings, demos, or launch. Those travel costs should be included in your budget.
Review the sample project budgets below.