The Project Planning Phase is extremely important and crucial to the project’s success. Going off what @ks629 mentioned, its necessary during the planning phase to mitigate risk and to have contingency plan in place for as you mentioned, having integral team members not around for the implementation. I however disagree with the notion that not having several critical team members during the implementation phase can just adjusted to go back to the project plan and use outside resources to keep the project moving while they are out. I think this is a huge mistake in the Project planning phase by the PM. As Dr. Simon mentioned in the lecture, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”.

Why would several critical team members not be available during the implementation? I agree that you can mitigate risks and account for vacations and holidays, but these should have come up earlier in the planning phase. As Dr. Simon addressed in lecture you must in the Planning Phase; 1. Assemble your team 2. Meet with your team 3. Solidify the scope 4. Hold a kickoff meeting with stakeholders. If you went through the appropriate steps during the planning phase, I would hope your critical team members would see that during the implementation dates they would plan to be out of the office and would suggest moving the timeline then and that it would not be acceptable for them to not be available during the implementation. If several critical members were all out sick or had emergencies hopefully there would be a contingency plan, but if that required looking externally to contract outside resources to keep this moving while critical team members were out, I think that would be incurring additional costs, expensive costs, which again you would be able to adjust in the Gantt chart but to inform key stakeholders would be a problem. If you informed key stakeholders that you would require additional resources just at the implementation phase would probably result in the project being delayed because management might not approve/provide the additional resources to contract out. This type of oversight might potentially result in some of the critical team members being fired if they weren’t available to implement the project or project manager being fired for not effectively planning the project.