The basic ingredients of a working plan

A work plan clearly lays out the steps needed to get to a stated goal. It serves as a guiding document for the clear objectives, deliverables and actions that comprise the process of working toward that goal and measuring your company’s progress.

Before embarking on the creation of a work plan, it’s useful to have command of a few key terms that will come up repeatedly along the way:

• Goal
• Strategy
• Objective
• Tactics

We’ll look at each of these individually.

The goal

Agoaldefines the overall mission concept. It’s possible to produce work plans at a variety of scales, so this could be anything from the big-picture mission of your company as a whole to the driving mission behind the work plan of a project.

If your company has an overall big-picture mission (such as “extend our HVAC sales and service network throughout the Tri-State area by the first quarter of 2023”), this can be the goal that your big-picture working plan develops back from. An even more specific goal might be for a software company to have a particular project prototyped, tested and on the market within a certain time frame. One helpful tool for developing goals is the SMART framework, which stands for “specific, measurable, attainment, relevant and time-based.”

The strategy

The broad strokes of what you need to reach your goal are called a strategy. The strategy is about what, conceptually, needs to happen to bring the goal about.

So, for example, extending the reach of an HVAC company within a certain time frame might involve a strategy for hiring more staff, updating and expanding the business’s vehicle fleet and increasing the efficiency of marketing ROI. Bringing a specific piece of software to market typically requires a multipronged go-to-market (GTM) strategy, including factors like the identification of potential buyers, the value to be delivered, and marketing and pricing.

The objectives

The nitty-gritty of carrying out your strategy is defined through its objectives, which are the measurable deliverables that tell you how near or far you are from your overall goal.

Where the strategy defines the broad strokes, the objectives identify the clear and realistic priorities that manifest ideas becoming action. For example, a specific objective for a plan to improve marketing ROI might be to earn a minimum of a certain percentage of money on each dollar of marketing spend within a certain time frame. The particulars of your objectives will naturally vary widely depending on the overall goal and strategy.

The tactics

Where objectives are about deliverables, tactics are about the methods you’re proposing to achieve those deliverables. Another way of putting it is that objectives are the specific and demonstrablewhatis needed to attain the goal, and the tactics are thehow.

For example, where the objective is to increase the ROI of your marketing spend within a particular time frame, the associated tactic would be about the specific approach to different marketing channels and the time and budget to be invested in each. Tactical planning is its own subdiscipline in creating a work plan. Keep in mind that on each of these components of a work plan—which involve increasing levels of research and detail—it’s important to maintain a balance between planning and doing. You want to prevent the “planning” phase from becoming a kind of paralysis.

Further aspects of a work plan

Knowing the basic elements of what goes into a work plan is the first step in creating one, but there are further crucial considerations.

Collaborator buy-in

Any work plan needs buy-in from the collaborators and key players of an organization for it to work. Often, the first phase in the creation of a work plan involves bringing together project sponsors, champions and collaborators to hammer out a common vision of what needs to happen and how it needs to happen. Without that initial buy-in, any plan can prove difficult to implement, no matter how well-made.

Team composition and responsibilities

The plan also needs to identify the ideal team to carry out the project and the responsibilities of specific team members. Having clearly delineated roles and lines of communication is crucial to efficiently carrying out a work plan and meeting the targets it identifies.

Budgeting

Finally, the plan needs a realistic budget based on real data and in-depth research into factors such as third-party expenses. The ultimate goal of most work plans is to make your business more profitable, so this budget should be revisited throughout the project to make sure its assumptions remain on target and the expenses involved in meeting its various objectives have been accurately broken out.

Step-by-step work plans and examples

The overall result of creating a work plan should be a unified step-by-step living document or worksheet that:

• Establishes your goal and the general strategic ideas for meeting that goal
• Identifies the scope and constraints of the project and its specific and demonstrable objectives
• Spells out how those objectives will be met, by whom and with what resources

Consider using dedicated project management software for this purpose, although it can be done in Excel or Google Sheets in a pinch.

When putting together a work plan, it can be helpful to have some examples to work from. Different types of work plans might be needed for employees, managers and the overall managers of a business. Work plans can range in their degree of complexity and the level of detail of the associated budgeting and staffing information.

You can find some work plan examples and templateson Indeed.com. General guidelines to keep in mind are that the plan should be detailed enough to be useful to the team at all stages of the process but not encumbered with so much detail that the document becomes difficult to follow or otherwise unclear. The plan is always a living document that can be adjusted to meet new realities or to change underlying assumptions if they prove mistaken or become outdated.

With a clear and effective work plan, any project stands a far better chance of delivering on expectations and providing value for your business.