1 Key to Building the Best Plan for Your Project
This article covers how to create the best plan, so your team is inspired to create the best approach to accomplishing their goals, and free to adapt to the best tasks to achieve those goals.
Creating and managing the Approach is under the PLAN domain and within the Map segment in the Project Management MPM model.
Creating and managing the Approach is under the PLAN domain and within the Map segment in the Project Management MPM model
The Best Project Plan is Deliverables-based
Many times, when project leaders build business plans, they include activities in the first two levels of a plan, which means that deliverables and the tasks to create those deliverables are sometimes at the same level in the plan. In other words, they intermix what is being delivered with how it is being delivered.
If you create an activities-focused plan, though, it will make it hard for your team to stay on track because as difficulties arise in the completion of tasks, as they often do, the goal and focus can be misaligned.
In activities-focused plan, the goal can easily become how best to complete the tasks. In a deliverables-based plan, the goal is how best to complete the deliverables. In the former the goal is the task completion. In the latter the goal is the deliverable completion and always looking for the most effective and efficient tasks.
Tasks or activities should be set up to allow flexibility to change them as team members find better ways of achieving the end goals, which are ultimately the deliverables.
In your approach, all of the items in at least the first two or three levels of your plan need to be tangible items, goals, or things that you can point to as something accomplished, rather than activities – actions taken to accomplish a goal.
You’ll find that deliverables are less susceptible to change, because they represent the terms of your agreement, since they’re the tangible items you’re giving your client in exchange for payment or other remuneration.
Deliverables-based Plans Leave Room for Creativity
The deliverables are outcomes everyone can focus on, so your team is more unified towards accomplishing these goals, and free to adapt to the best tasks to achieve their goals.
Activities tend to give people blinders, because they focus so much on how they’re doing something and making sure the steps are procedures are correct that they lose sight of the outcome needed by the project, their piece of the output.
Your Approach can inspire the team to be creative
Another way of saying this: if I identify to you what needs to be done and break it down one level below that into subcomponents, but don’t tell you how to do it, you will be more motivated, in general, to find the most efficient activities to achieve those smaller subcomponents.
If in the approach I list the high-level activities that I expect you would have to do to accomplish a deliverable, then I leave you no room for creativity; I confine you to that approach whether or not you find a more effective way of achieving the same result.
The Right Approach Inspires
I remember one project where I joined partway through and inherited an in-progress project plan. The plan specified that the project team should use a particular tool to create an output, an architecture diagram. It was listed at the highest level in the plan.
Lack of Flexibility can be Suffocating
There was no flexibility: the plan said that the particular tool needed to be used, whether it was the best way to create the diagram or not. The architecture diagram was treated as though it was less important than the activity of using the tool, when it was the actual architecture, the required output of that tool, that was more important.
I could hear in initial discussions that the project team wasn’t sure that creating the drawing by using that particular tool was the best way to get the work accomplished.
However, someone had purchased the tool, so the team didn’t want it to look like the funds were wasted by leaving the tool unused.
In this example, the priorities were backwards. Your output to your client should always be your first priority, with your project plan working towards those deliverables.
The project team, by prioritizing the tool, was decreasing the importance of the deliverable – the architecture diagram.
Realign the Plan if Necessary
I redid the project plan, focusing the first two levels of the plan on the architectural diagram and the component pieces of that diagram.
I identified the three key components that had to be a part of that diagram in order for it to be usable by the rest of the team and the project.
I did not specify how the components were to be created. I didn’t even specify the particular tool that had been purchased. The tasks were left open and not defined. The project needed the architecture diagram by a particular date, and it was irrelevant how it was created.
The Right Approach Inspires
What was fascinating was that once the plan was redone, the team responsible for creating the diagram was very motivated to find the most expedient way to the develop the architecture components.
They completely bypassed the tool and created the architectural diagram with its components in less than half the time it would have taken to do it with that particular tool. This created some valuable contingency time in the project. They also kept the costs in-line with expectations.
Energy and Collaboration from the Right Approach
More than that, I witnessed what a natural high that was for the energy of the team to collaborate for an end result like that, where they decided on the best activities.
Afterwards, they agreed that the deliverables they produced were better than what the initial tool would have produced.
Summary
It’s essential to create a deliverables-based project plan rather than an activities-based plan.
This ensures the team is focused on and motivated to work together, finding the best ways to achieve the plan outcomes.
This goes a long way to helping you form a team that is highly creative, effective and adaptive.
Action Steps / Apply This Knowledge
- Look at your own plans and approaches that describe how the deliverables are connected to create an end-result. Try to identify any areas where the focus is on activities at too high a level.
- How would you change your plan so that the outcomes and milestones are focused on outputs instead? Often this involves moving lower levels up to higher levels and pushing activities to the bottom.
- Prompt engineering guidance for AI GPTs such as chatGPT: “I’m a business leader launching a project that is to deliver X, Y, and Z outcomes. What steps, activities, and tips should I follow to create the best plan?”
Learn More to Do More
Business evolves through change initiatives otherwise known as projects. The key to managing these change initiatives so you have more time, and less stress is to use simple strategies and tools.
Check out the Learning Hub’s other Articles with Actionable Steps, organized with a busy leader in mind, by topic or main idea, and with some AI GPT (e.g. ChatGPT) prompt engineering suggestions under the Action steps: https://simplepmstrategies.com/learning-hub-index
PLAN – Build the Best Plan
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