The quality of software products may be improved by enhancing the performance of any of the varied activities associated with the production of the software. One such activity is ‘project planning’. Project planning may be a small part of the total project effort, but will have a large effect on all activities in the project and, therefore, a major impact on the final software quality. Thus the cost benefits that can be expected from effective project planning are substantial. This paper discusses ‘structured planning’ – the integration of many aspects of planning, such as work breakdown, scheduling, resource allocation and change/defect tracking, into a single project model, which could be the basis of a structured planning software tool.