The following is a proposed outline for a project/product plan. It tries to take all aspects of creating and sustaining a product into consideration.
1.0 What is the Product?
Brief description of what the project will do and what problem it is supposed to solve.
1.1 Deliverables
What products and/or services will this project produce?
1.2 Goals
what are the goals of this project and how do they relate to the larger organizational goals?
1.3 Non-goals
what are explictly non-goals of the project? this is to help define its scope clearly.
2.0 Who is the Customer?
Describe who the customer would be for this product and why they would use it.
3.0 How will it be Built?
This is basically a high-level development plan.
3.1 Overview
A general approach.
3.2 Components
what are the pieces that have to be developed?
3.3 Resources
What is needed to build it?
3.3.1 People
number of FTEs, contractors, specific people involved and their roles
3.3.2 Hardware
hardware needed to develop the project
3.3.3 Software
software tools or dependent libraries, components, etc.
3.4 Timeline
A very high-level timeline, i.e. Prototype, major integration points, Alpha, Beta, Final Release?
4.0 How to Assure Quality?
a high level Test Plan
4.1 Overview
overview of testing approaches, e.g. "get a thousand monkeys and lock them in a room with the product", plus specific phases of testing (unit testing, integration, user acceptance, etc)
4.2 Resources
who is involved in testing it?
4.2.1 People
FTEs, contractors, specific people and their roles
4.2.2 Hardware
testing-specific hardware
4.2.3 Software
software tools, packages, etc for testing
4.3 Timelines
rough idea of various phases of testing (unit testing, integration, user acceptance, etc), espectially as they relate to the dev timeline
5.0 How do we Support It?
touch on the various aspects of communicating with the customer & supporting their use of the product
5.1 Documentation plan
documentation for the end user? help files? developers? support staff? FAQ?
5.2 Customer support
(first, second, third tier, etc)
5.3 Issue Management
how will customer issues be managed? Request Tracker? RT feed to Jira? Triage process?
What about Forums for customer Q&A?
5.3 Customer Services
consulting services to help customers in customizing or doing whatever needs doing to use this product.
6.0 Operations Plan
What will is take to keep this product running, if applicable? (i.e. a centralized service of some kind)
6.1 SLA schedule
what are the SLAs? what do they cost? how do we support those SLA?
6.2 Resources
What operations resources are needed for the respective SLAs?
6.3 Run book
on a very coarse level, what are the major procedures that product operations care about?
7.0 Roadmap
what are the general plans to maintain it? upgrade it? release patches, new versions?
8.0 Outreach Plan
How do we market it to the MIT community? How do we make people aware of it, how do we offer incentives to use it?
9.0 Dependencies
highlight dependencies on other groups both internal/external, HW, SW, etc.
10.0 Risks
Risk/Mitigation strategy for each