Having clear requirements and doing thorough planning can help set up your project for success. In projects you have been involved, what approaches were used during the planning process? Were they effective? If not, how might they be improved? I have had teams use simple planning approaches (sticky notes on the whiteboard) and very complex approaches were they had hundreds of tasks entered into a tool like Primavera. As you might expect, somewhere in the middle worked the best for us. We might still do high level planning with sticky notes to get an initial plan in place. We realized that having more than a few hundred tasks to be managed at the program level (we defined a program as the collection of sub-system projects that contributed to the entire architecture) was not sustainable. We identified a set of synchronization points that had well defined requirements and each sub-system had to develop there own schedules to deliver the right things for each synchronization point.