Garden expansion project – Part 2 – Planning

A step by step plan for our garden expansion project

We’ve been working on our Garden expansion project for a few weeks now and we’re ready for the next step – planning. We got through our general idea and estimating parts pretty easily, and as our next step we need to plan out all  the steps so we can make sure everything gets done in time. Planning any project can be a little bit of a bummer because you don’t get to DO any of the steps, just think about them and write them down. Especially when you’re talking about planning a gardening project. Fortunately for us its still well below freezing outside and our weekly indoor garden routine is all done for today.

Choosing a project structure

You can do a project plan with your choice of tools. Anything from paper and pencil all the way to a robust tracking tool.  To map out our garden expansion project plan, we used Microsoft Project because we’re familiar with it and happen to have it handy.  Anyway of making a list with dates and showing what has to happen in which order is ideal.

Don’t forget to take life into account

One  big key miss in most project plans is that they forget to take holidays or other non-working time into account. Then when those things do come up, they cause all sorts of drama in having to move tasks or try to be creative to pick up any slack. The best thing to do, before writing any of your tasks down is to grab a calendar and look at what times and days will be available for working on your project and blocking out anything where you might have a conflict. As an example, you might have Martin Luther Kink Jr. day off from work and can add it as an extra working day on your project, then again, you might have to take your sweetie out for a special dinner on Valentine’s day and won’t be able to tend to your leaf babies that evening. You don’t have to get down to hours and minutes here, but knowing what time you want to account for so you can balance your project with the other parts of your life is essential.

Make your plan

Now that we have the structure and critical dates out of the way we can open this bag of snakes and lay them out straight. Similar to our estimate we laid out our tasks in buy, build, plant order. we made top level categories called buy, build and plant, figuring we have to buy stuff before we can build with it, and build stuff before we can plant anything.

Task list

After you get your headings sorted so you can make sense of what all you’re going to be working on, come up with anything that you’ll need to do in that category.  As general rules of thumb a task should be a complete thing to itself, so it can’t be listed in multiple categories unless its something you’re going to do more than once. As an example, you might think welded wire might go under both the buy and build area since its both something we have to buy and something we have to install.  The way we accounted for that in our plan is that under Buy, we listed all the items to purchase, and then under build we listed the activity that we’ll do with it.

Here’s our general task list:

The layout does not drive ordering strictly but it just gives us the opportunity to write down whatever comes to mind from a task perspective.  We could get down to even higher levels of detail here, as an example, installing the fence could be broken down into measuring, drawing lines, digging holes, and connecting the fence to the posts. But we decided that wasn’t really needed at this time to make a plan.

Timing

Back in our estimate, we thought about, at a really high level, how much time we thought some of these activities would take. We also thought about things like shipping time and took our USDA calendar into account.

These tasks are the key to our plan since we’ve made most of our decisions based on our thaw and last frost dates.  If the weather doesn’t cooperate, these are the date’s well change to re-calculate the balance of the plan, since most of everything else works backwards from here.

Other than things like shipping, rather than trying to work out how much time each item on our plan will take us to do, we allocated how much time we want to allow for each task. For example, we know starting our seeds indoors won’t take us a whole day, and it wont take us but an hour or so to make our online purchases (thanks to our list) so as long as it gets done within that day we’re fine.  In a project where you have multiple people working, or have smaller windows of time to work in, it’s better to estimate actual effort here.

Dependancies

Congratulations! You’re almost done. Planning out your gardening tasks and the time they’ll take is a huge part of the planning process. The last part is setting dates for all your activities. Since you know when your thaw and last frost dates are and you blocked off any non working days, you can start setting dependencies, which should, make your task plan turn into a real garden project plan.

If you’re going to use Microsoft project to do your planning, we’ll share couple of things we learned from an old project manager a long time ago.

• Always set a dependency for every task. For key tasks add a set of considerations that will allow them to start
• Finish to Finish (FF) tasks are tasks that can start independently at any time as long as they finish at the same time
• Finish to Start  (FS) are the default type task, you must finish task A before you start task B
• Start to start (SS) tasks must start at the same time, but can finish whenever
• Lead and use lead and lag time to make things land on the dates you want, don’t force an item to occur on a specific date

how to read this plan, the task Buy: Welded wire must finish before the last frost date so we can install the fence on time for transplanting. So we set a dependency on task ID 7 (Last frost date) and added 10 days of lead time for shipping. We can of course start this task earlier if we have time (or money) but it must be complete before task 29 (install fence).  We’re not going to torture you by writing about how every task is linked together,  you are welcome to ask any questions in our comments section or forum about planning your garden project.

Dates

Now that we know when we’re available, our milestones, what has to happen in what order and about how long all the things will take, we can start planning out dates.  This is one of the cool parts about using a tool like MS Project. The dates are a total autopilot GPS thing. Once you’ve wired in the previous bits the dates should just line up to your last frost and ground thaw dates and exclude your non working days like magic.

If you’re doing this by hand it’s easy enough to figure, just make sure you don’t double book yourself for unavailable days.

Status

A key measurement for the success of any project is to check your status regularly. Its super important to go back to your plan and check off complete tasks or replan any late tasks.

If you’d like a copy of our project plan to do your own planning, let us know in the comments or on our forums.