3The planning stage plays an important role in helping guide stakeholders, sponsors, teams, and the project manager through all the other project phases. Planning is essential to identify the desired goals to reduce risks, avoid missed deadlines, and ultimately deliver the agreed product or the result. Without careful planning and good planning stage, the project performance is almost guaranteed to suffer and the project risk might increase. Project planning requires a break down of a larger project into small tasks and sometimes subtasks, assembling a project team and determining a schedule over which the work could be completed. During this important phase, a project manager can create smaller goals within the larger project, to make sure each is achievable within the time frame. The phrase “failure to plan is planning to fail” certainly holds true when it comes to managing projects like medical devices. Project managers should always be careful of three very important things: unrealistic project expectations, impatience and jumping into execution, and lack of understanding. Careful planning can help to achieve things like reducing potential risks, and reducing project failure rates. Overlapping tasks can be a reason to fall behind schedule and to not finish a project on time. An expert project manager should have a backup plan to any kind of emergencies or lack of employees or vacations or etc. This is a very important factor to keep in mind while going along with the planning stage, which in my opinion is the most important phase to achieve a successful project.