Project Plan
“Projects are forgiving at the beginning or the end - never both.”
Synchronizing teamwork into a formal project is incredibly valuable, saving time, frustration, and relationships on countless occasions. Synchronizing helps to minimize surprises, plan non-project activities, and get the best planning ideas on paper so that they become reality. A piece of good news for innovation teams: all project plans should have the same starting point. There is no need to reinvent the wheel.
The sections below paint a picture of a healthy project plan, captured in a tool meant for a project plan (like Microsoft Project), not in a tool meant for equations (like Microsoft Excel):
Inventory every asset that is in scope
Start your project plan with the parents People, Process, and Technology
For People, add children of ADKAR (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement)
For Process, add children of Current State (CS) and Future State (FS)
For Technology, add children to suit your choice of Agile or Waterfall; e.g. Design, Build, Test, Deploy (DBTD)
Add each asset as children of ADKAR, CS, FS, or DBTD
Add the Five Verbs as children to every asset (Draft, Review, Revise, Approve, Distribute)
Add dependencies as you see them
Add resource assignments
Consult the resources for their duration estimates
Unique traits of every project are within each asset; e.g. within the project charter, within the process flow, within training materials. If this feels oversimplified or incomplete to you, here are three cautions:
Meetings go in your scheduling tool (like Microsoft Outlook); it’s a slippery slope and an impossible task to think you can centrally manage and monitor all the meetings your project will have
a task list is a sign that you are reinventing the wheel, you are micromanaging, and you are losing sight of the big picture of the project
You have verb sprawl; using thirty verbs to manage your project is going to be a problem … you really only need Five Verbs
A robust, disciplined project plan is instrumental to minimizing waste and keeping an ensemble’s focus exactly where it needs to be, such as updating Percent Complete on a weekly basis!
Upstream Assets: Project Charter, Workload Report, Stoplight Report
Downstream Assets: numerous project-specific assets