A: Planning your first SharePoint project isn't much different from planning for any other project. The project manager on your team works with end users and developers to identify tasks, estimate the resources required, and establish a projected completion date.
The key differences are the question to ask. Are we using the OOB functionality such as SharePoint Designer and the web power user configuration process, or does this require.NET development? Another question that should be asked is, does our deployed SharePoint edition have enough for the requirements? Maybe SharePoint Enterprise is required.
To view editions you can visit the following site:
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/buy/Pages/Editions-Comparison.aspx
These are infrastructure questions that need to be planned out to build an application.