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.

What is the Product?

Brief description of what the product does and what problem it is supposed to solve.

Who is the Customer? 

Describe who the customer would be for this product and why they would use it.

How will it be Built?

A very coarse overview of the Development plan:

Components

what are the pieces that have to be developed?

Resources

What is needed to build it?

People

Hardware

Software

Timeline

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

How to Assure Quality?

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

Resources

People

Hardware

Software

Timelines

How do we Support It?

Documentation plan

Customer support

(first, second, third tier, etc) 

Operations Plan 

SLA schedule 

what are the SLAs? 

Resources 

What operations resources are needed for the respective SLAs?

Roadmap

How do we maintain it? upgrade it? release patches, new versions? 

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? 

Dependencies

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

Risks

Risk/Mitigation strategy for each