This is how I learnt how to plan projects. It was the late 1980's and I was working in the UK for an American computer manufacturer in its internal IT department. We had a number of people in a "projects" group responsible for moving offices, new installs, upgrades etc... and me as part of the operations group planning the workload over multiple mini computers. I was put on a course with a few of the project group and an instructor was brought in to get us to learn how projects are setup and managed. I think this was due to some conspicuous failures in the recent past. We expected to be using Microsoft Project (new at the time) but no....first we had to learn how to do it on pieces of card (index cards - 6 inches by 4 inches). This was invaluable... instead of learning and fighting the software we had to think about each part of the project and all aspects .... this was work breakdown structure[[work breakdown structure (wbs)]] in practice. We started with big pieces: - design - plan - redesign - develop - test - document - train - deploy to live. So that is 8 cards and you can quite easily see the dependency between them. Each card needed the following information to the front face. In the middle - the task (no more than one sentence) example is ""