Project Planning for Organizations: The Short Version

Ross Woods Rev. Oct. 06

Introduction

You need to go through all the steps as a whole team and the moderator must ensure that everyone has a fair say.

It uses a consensus model of planning and decision-making, which gains personal support from participants. It is not well-suited to situations where planning decisions must be based primarily on technical information.

To go through the entire process takes at least a full day, and there aren't really any short cuts (this is the short-cut version). You might feel that it's a long, long process, but part of the change is the very necessary process of letting people digest and discuss the issues.

Even if you know where to go, everybody else needs to be brought along too. Besides, the simple fact that you need such a discussion and that you are encouraging new ideas and thoughts will mean that you'll learn new things.

I've been through this process a number of times and the voting makes it seem democratic. It takes some maturity to see how the different personalities work together to produce a clear outcome.

It is essentially a consensus system, which is very good for community organizations. For general for-profit businesses, you will need to include hard data for the more "objective" kinds of decisions (money, demographics, etc.)

Before you start, choose a moderator and a secretary to write notes of as much of the discussion as possible. Besides the detailed notes, it's also far better to write all key points on large sheets of paper and pin them up around the room, because visual people need to see things written down. It sounds like a lot of bother, but it helps more than you think. During coffee breaks, people usually want to wander around and discuss them.

One of the most important factors is that each team member needs to process all the information as you go along. However, different people process information at different rates, so it's the moderator's job to:

Before you finish, have a look to see how far you've come and whether it all hangs together. If you've done it well, there should be some quite new directions and a fairly consistent plan.

 

Step 1: Evaluate the present situation

  1. What have we done? Describe your efforts so far.
  2. What are we trying to achieve? Be specific. Who? Where?
  3. Are there directions and trends that affect what we are doing? Look at what other organizations are doing. Are social, cultural or political factors emerging?
  4. Are there assumptions that we can make about the future? (You can probably make a useful forecast in general brushstrokes.)
  5. Look at who you have and their ability to work in teams. Does the team have any particular strengths that influence its future? What particular resources do you have?
  6. Are there problems facing us? Gather the different insights of team members.
  7. Are good opportunities hidden in these problems?

Step 2: What do we expect as results of our future project?

Even if you have general goals, this is the case, try to be more specific.

Step 3: Write a vision statement for the project

It should encapsulate what you are trying to achieve. Write your ideas down and toss them around. Vision statements should have no more than three ideas and no more than six words. The absolute maximum is ten words, because people will forget anything longer. (Alternatively, develop a brief slogan that everyone can easily remember and have a longer vision statement of up to one hundred words.)

Step 4: Make a list of Critical Success Factors (CSF)

What factors are critical to the success of the project? List them in writing. When two or more are basically the same, group them together under an inclusive title.

Step 5: Priorities CSFs

You must now decide which of the critical success factors need urgent attention. In a team situation, a good way to go is to use a voting system. Get everybody separately and individually to number the CSFs from most important to least important. Then count the votes for each CSF, so that the result reflects the group's opinion. (Voting is theoretically inaccurate but it seems to work very well because idiosyncratic votes tend to be cancelled out.)

Step 6. Define a cut-off point on the list

Define a cut-off point on the list where the lower-priority CSFs can be put aside. For example, if you have a list of twenty points, the first eight might be worth urgent attention and the remainder can be left for later. For some reason unknown to me, priority lists tend to number between six and twelve, with about eight or ten points being most normal.

Step 7: Develop strategies to handle or overcome each CSF

If you are a large team, you will probably need to split up into small groups and allocate each group a CSF. You'll also need to make a list of short-term goals for the next year and a list of long-term goals for the next five years.

Step 8: Make a list of actual and potential personnel

Someone once observed that amateurs work on strategy while professionals work on logistics. Planning to develop and maintain a team of real people in place is more helpful that drawing up a perfect strategy that would only work in an ideal world.

Step 9: Allocate tasks to team members

Don’t forget to define accountability and reporting arrangements.