The demand for achieving sustainable development has drawn national wide attention so that many sustainable projects, such as ecological village projects, soon emerge in Indonesia’s construction industry. Nevertheless, some of them are successfully executed; others are stuck by various difficulties. The associate issues of many difficult cases reveal the importance of consistency in planning to execution. One pilot sustainable project, Tapak Bumi Ecological Village, is investigated. Since 2008, the village, Tapak Bumi Village has started its project to be a sustainable village. This project adopted direct design and direct build concept which means not going into thorough project planning. In third year of the project, the project faced behind schedule and over budget. Moreover, the status of this project now is stagnant, waiting for outside help. From this point of view, this study tests the hypothesis whether or not this ecovillage project did poor planning, review the project planning role in a project based on this case study, and reveal the consequences by doing poor planning.
The results show that the hypothesis if the project did poor planning is justified. Evaluating each PM knowledge areas in planning process, the project planning role based on this study is revealed: (1) giving more assurance, (2) providing guidance, (3) assuring the project progress by reducing misunderstanding problems, and (4) having reliable estimates to ensure effective performance. Furthermore, some consequences by doing poor planning are also reviewed.

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