Project Planning Definition

Project planning is the process of quantifying the amount of time and the size of the budget for a project. The output of the project planning process is a project plan that a project manager can use to track the project team's progress.

Steve McConnell, author of several software development books, identified nine deadly sins of project planning. They are:

1. Not planning at all.
2. Failing to account for all project activities.
3. Failure to plan for risk.
4. Using the same plan for every project.
5. Applying prepackaged plans indiscriminately.
6. Allowing a plan to diverge from project reality.
7. Planning in too much detail too soon.
8. Planning to catch up later.
9. Not learning from past planning sins.

Other Definitions

I've also put together a description of project management fundamentals if you're interested in learning more about this profession.