After securing approval for a concise but comprehensive goal statement that defines the scope of the project, your next major planning function is to draw up a list of activities or tasks that must be completed to achieve the project goal. Using Microsoft Project to help create the task list can save a great deal of time and effort. At this stage of the process, the computer's major contribution is as a word processing tool to help you enter, annotate, revise, and rearrange your ideas. You take advantage of its impressive computational powers in later chapters when you tell it how to schedule the tasks and assign resources to them.
Tip
Starting the planning process typically follows completion of project initiation, the deliverables of which include the assignment of the project manager and the issuance of the project charter. Once created, the course of the project has been set and the product of the project has been defined.