Guide
Macro planning: framing a project before going into detail
A high-level plan of ten to twenty lines, built before the detailed schedule. It is what you commit to — the detail is only how you intend to get there.
A macro plan is the project seen from above: a handful of phases, their sequence, their approximate duration and the milestones between them. Ten to twenty lines, rarely more. It is built at framing time, before anyone has broken the work down into tasks, and it is the version the sponsor, the steering committee and the other projects will actually use.
Why start there rather than with the detail
Detail before framing produces a plan nobody can arbitrate: 600 tasks whose total end date is a result, not a choice. Starting from the macro plan reverses that. You decide the shape of the project — how many phases, in which order, with what deadline — and the detailed breakdown then has to fit inside it, or prove that it cannot. The disagreement then happens in week two, not in month six.
What belongs in it and what does not
It holds phases, milestones, major dependencies and the external constraints that are not negotiable — a regulatory deadline, a seasonal freeze, a resource available only in the second half. It does not hold individual tasks, named people or day-level dates. Every time someone adds one, the macro plan loses the property that makes it useful: fitting on one screen.
It is a commitment, not a draft
The macro plan is the level at which a project is compared with the others in the portfolio, so it is the level at which it is committed. That means it does not get rewritten quietly: when a phase moves, the macro plan moves, it is visible, and someone decides. A macro plan silently realigned on the detailed schedule has stopped being a reference point.
Keeping it in step with the detail
The failure mode is well known: the macro plan is drawn once in a slide deck, the detailed schedule lives in the tool, and three months later they disagree. The only durable answer is to have them be the same object at two levels of zoom, not two documents maintained by two people.
The macro plan in FoxPlan
In FoxPlan the macro plan is the top level of the same Gantt: summary tasks carry the phases, their dates being derived from what they contain, and milestones mark the transitions. Collapse the tree and you have the macro plan; expand it and you have the detail — with the guarantee that neither can drift away from the other, since there is only one plan.
