Planning

1. Preparation – recipe for success

When you know what your goal is and it’s time to make it happen, how can you maximise the chances of success? One factor recognised as one of five that are key to project success by APM Research in 2016 “Conditions for Project Success” is effective planning and review. We may well ask in an ever-changing VUCA environment “do I still need to plan?”, but taking time to understand what activities need done and how all the tasks fit together will never be wasted, provided the regular review process is also in place. Acknowledge from the outset that you are likely to have to make adjustments to the plan along the way – to be useful and effective, a plan must be dynamic and responsive to changing conditions, but having a good understanding of how all the tasks required fit together will aid progress. Planning, to an appropriate level for the foreseeable horizon, helps you adapt and pivot more quickly and easily when changes occur, instead of starting over from scratch every time.

Sometimes it can be tempting to treat planning as simply forming a “To Do” list or jotting a few dots/blocks on a calendar. Many organised, capable people I know thrive off lists. A close friend of mine is a case in point – shopping lists, actions lists, lists of contacts, lists of queries… I would not be surprised if she has a list of lists! However, the delivery plan for a business venture or a sizeable project or event is far more than just a list. You could say it is more similar to a recipe than a To Do list. The plan will tell us…

• what the expected output(s) is/are
• what ‘ingredients’ and other inputs we need
• what actions are required
• the order /sequence of actions
• the minimum time to complete
• the costs of each aspect of the plan
• the estimate to complete

2. The Name Game

The first feature of the plan is the title and/or description. Whether it is launching a new business or product, completing a house move, planning a special event, or the development of a new skill or service, simply naming the project can be useful since it forces you to filter and focus in on what it is you are trying to create. Taking a vague idea with vast array of possible outcomes and turning it into a specific output always requires sifting out unimportant possibilities. Take the time you need to decide the right formulation for your idea, but getting into the habit early of visualising the outcome as clearly as possible is a very good place to start, especially if you need others to get on board with the idea.

To use a simple example, if your project was to make a cake, which type and scale of cake are you aiming for? If it were a finished product on a restaurant dessert menu, how would it be described? A “Scrumptious Giant Jammy Coconut Tower”? A “Home-made Lemon Drizzle Loaf”? “Delicious Death by Chocolate Gateaux”? “Traditional Victoria Sponge”? Each of these may share similar ingredients (and all sound equally tempting to me!), but they create very different and distinct visions of the outcome, and all this is communicated simply by the name. A name or short phrase description for your venture may come to mind immediately, or it may require some thought, but by allowing yourself to clearly visualise the outcome and naming it, you are already identifying the best way to communicate that as concisely as possible. This will help you focus on the goal and make it easier for you to garner support for your vision.

3. Plan Segments and Scope

Your plan will be likely to include multiple independent elements. For example, if your aim was to hold a charity ball, you may have part of the plan related to Ticket Sales, and another part related to Entertainment and a further for the Food offering. Think of this like the stages in a recipe. If you were making a cake, you would have a recipe for the sponge mixture and a separate section for the filling and possibly a third about the décor. Each can be made separately but all come together to form the end result, often illustrated with a photograph and instruction ‘how to serve’. Listing out the constituent segments of your vision (Known to Project Managers as ‘outputs’, ‘products’, ‘artefacts’ or ‘deliverables’), helps to bring clarity and focus.

For example, there is a difference between the vague goal ‘host a charity event’ and the plan to hold a ‘formal charity ball’. Envisioning the event as “a summer evening formal occassion with a choice of bands, a 4 course meal and late night snacks provided” gives us much more information on the type of event it will be and, equally importantly, what it is not. Whilst details can still be worked out later, being clear on the boundary of the scope from an early stage can avoid much wasted effort. Defining the charity event as a ‘formal’ for example immediately excludes many unsuitable venues you may have otherwise wasted time investigating.

4. Ingredients (Tasks)

What makes a plan more than just a list is that for each task we take care to understand the task in more detail. We wouldn’t be able to follow a recipe if it only said “take some flour, some sugar and mix with a few eggs”. We expect much more precise instructions. What type of flour? Wholemeal or White? Self Raising? In exactly what proportions? When we write down the tasks for a plan, we also consider other details related to the task – like what resources are needed and in what volume? How long is it expected to take? Do you already know who is going to perform that task or is that something you still need to find out? Going through each item line by line drives us to consider these questions and often identifies for us some additional tasks or known risks that can then be mitigated or managed.

We may come to a section and realise we do not have any of the answers – perhaps we need to hire a band for the charity ball but have no contacts, or no understanding of costs to hire. We may not even know which type of band the attendees would be most likely to enjoy. These questions are valuable, as they can lead to adding in some research or benchmarking tasks that we otherwise wouldn’t have thought were necessary. This allows us to build a much more realistic plan. We still may not know the answers but we can satisfy ourselves that we have allowed appropriate time to research the options. Also, if we allowed a budget for the band eg £900 but had low confidence in our knowledge of whether this would be suitable figure or not, we may add some contingency to the figures in recognition of the risk we have got it wrong.

5. In the Mix – linking dependencies

Once we have an understanding of each of the individual high level tasks, we need to be clear on how they fit together and what their relationship is to other tasks within the plan. In a recipe, this would be called the method. It is another key difference between a plan and a to-do list or a simple “roadmap” view with no investigated plan of substance underneath. In a plan, we recognise that some tasks can only be completed once others have been done, and we map out the impact this has on our timeline by linking the tasks as dependencies. For example, in planning the charity ball, we may learn that the venue does not allow cancellations within 30 days of the event or else they will charge. This gives us a fixed deadline to work towards to sell tickets. It would also be sensible to add in a checkpoint a week or two before – to review progress of sales to date and assess if it is still worthwhile going ahead – perhaps to redouble our sales efforts if they are not where we want them to be, or to postpone the date if it is no longer viable. Building in these ‘control points’ allows us to review our decisions, assess the rest of the tasks ahead in the light of information to hand, and gives us the opportunity to keep our plan relevant, or pivot if needed.

Summary

Planning remains a critical success factor for project delivery. Taking time to define the vision, break down the component parts and consider each high level task in turn creates opportunities for more solid understanding of scope and risk. Provided the plan is created within an appropriate level of detail for the foreseeable horizon and is kept under review, it enables us to enables us to pivot more quickly in response to change.

Thinking of your own venture, have you understood the component tasks in the recipe for success? Do you want to gain some further practise in planning? Download the next CHANGEGUIDE mini-guide worksheet to help embed the learning and hone your skills.