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 product does and what problem it is supposed to solve.

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?

3.1 Overview 

A very coarse overview of the Development plan:

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

3.3.2 Hardware

3.3.3 Software

3.4 Timeline

A very high-level timeline, i.e. Prototype, major integration points, Alpha, Beta, Final Release?

4.0 How to Assure Quality?

4.1 Overview 

very high level overview of the plan for how to test, e.g. "get a thousand monkeys and lock them in a room with the product"

4.2 Resources

4.2.1 People

4.2.2 Hardware

4.2.3 Software

4.3 Timelines

very coarse, relate to dev timeline. 

5.0 How do we Support It?

5.1 Documentation plan

5.2 Customer support

(first, second, third tier, etc) 

5.3Customer Services

consulting services to help customers in customizing or doing whatever needs doing to use this product. 

6.0 Operations Plan 

6.1 SLA schedule 

what are the SLAs? 

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

How do we 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 peole aware of it, how do we offer incentives to use it? 

9.0 Dependencies

highlight dependencies on other groups, HW, SW, etc. 

10.0 Risks

Risk/Mitigation strategy for each