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.
Brief description of what the project will do and what problem it is supposed to solve.
What products and/or services will this project produce?
what are the goals of this project and how do they relate to the larger organizational goals?
what are explictly non-goals of the project? this is to help define its scope clearly.
Describe who the customer would be for this product and why they would use it.
This is basically a high-level development plan.
A general approach.
what are the pieces that have to be developed?
What is needed to build it?
number of FTEs, contractors, specific people involved and their roles
hardware needed to develop the project
software tools or dependent libraries, components, etc.
A very high-level timeline, i.e. Prototype, major integration points, Alpha, Beta, Final Release?
a high level Test Plan
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)
who is involved in testing it?
FTEs, contractors, specific people and their roles
testing-specific hardware
software tools, packages, etc for testing
rough idea of various phases of testing (unit testing, integration, user acceptance, etc), espectially as they relate to the dev timeline
touch on the various aspects of communicating with the customer & supporting their use of the product
documentation for the end user? help files? developers? support staff? FAQ?
(first, second, third tier, etc)
how will customer issues be managed? Request Tracker? RT feed to Jira? Triage process?
What about Forums for customer Q&A?
consulting services to help customers in customizing or doing whatever needs doing to use this product.
What will is take to keep this product running, if applicable? (i.e. a centralized service of some kind)
what are the SLAs? what do they cost? how do we support those SLA?
What operations resources are needed for the respective SLAs?
on a very coarse level, what are the major procedures that product operations care about?
what are the general plans to maintain it? upgrade it? release patches, new versions?
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?
highlight dependencies on other groups both internal/external, HW, SW, etc.
Risk/Mitigation strategy for each