I hope to do a series of posts sharing my experience of these disciplines and how I've chosen to apply them to a creative business setting. I hope this is helpful to anyone starting out, looking to improve their current operations and re-organise their affairs. I'd welcome your thoughts and comments!
Today I'll start with planning. The greatest piece of advice I can give was actually given to me by my last ever Manager. An inspiring results orientated guy who taught me a lot. I was working as Project Manager for a national disability employment company. I'd been set the task of designing a complex, multi-department project plan, involving a lot of people, tasks and targets. The risks were high and the benefactors of the project were real live people who needed the support of our services. Ready to get into Microsoft Project and colour code my Gantt chart, put in my gateways and rival the Olympic Park Planning Team, I met with my Manager. He told me directly and in no uncertain terms that a great Project Manager wasn't the one with the fanciest plan, he didn't care what I used to create my plan and had no designs on how I laid it out. What he wanted was a quick, easy to use and regularly updated task list. My time was not to be spent hiding behind documents and methodology but out there negotiating, motivating and monitoring that those tasks were actually being done. That approach has stuck with me ever since. So I'm not going to wax lyrical about how to create complex and impressive 'strategic plans', I'm going to tell you how to put together a simple, effective and workable plan (let's be honest we're self employed, or heading that way because we're do-ers). The only exception to my advice here is business planning for the purpose of loans, seeking investment or such like, I'm referring to personal planning for our own useful purposes.
I define planning as setting out the intentions you have for a project or business stream, detailing what needs to be done to get there, and setting measurements, so you know if you did it. A plan is not something you can tick off the to do list. It's an ongoing, working, continuously updated reference for you and your team to work from. My plans are opened at the start of the day and sit on my desk top, waiting to be updated, re-jigged and used to motivate me to get things done!
Here's how I approach creating the document itself...
1. Define my end goal(s), or to use project jargon 'products'. Sit down and write a list of tangible results you want to achieve. Let's use one my most recent new businesses, our Stags and Barbers, as an example. Our list looked something like this:
Barbershop and games room open
Staff recruited and trained
Activities and services designed and ready to offer
Brand launched and word out there.
etc etc.
These aren't tasks, these are finished results. Tasks will be listed individually under each of the headings above.
2. Decide how you'll know when it's done, or 'performance measures'. The list would start looking something like this:
Barbershop and games room open (Measure: We are able to offer all services from the space)
Staff recruited and trained (Measure: Team present and able to deliver all services on day of opening)
Activities and services designed and on marketing (Measure: Written on website, with prices and description)
Brand launched and word out there (Measure: People at launch event)
etc etc.
3. Detail tasks under each heading, with a deadline and name of who will do it. Be explicit in the task. Realistically assign a time period each task will take to do.
4. Draw out the essential order tasks are to be done in. This is termed critical path analysis in Project Management. The planning geek in me loves this task (you should have seen my Christmas dinner 2010 plan!). So, for example if I'm going to apply critical path analysis to doing my make up, I need to clearly identify which tasks have to be done, before others can be started. It would go like this:
For the purpose of this example, the path shows that nothing in row 2 can be started until the task in row 1 is completed. Then all in row 2 must be completed before row 3 tasks can be started and so forth. This is genuinely really useful, going back my barbers plan, if we look at the section dealing with branding and word getting out there. We knew that getting the word out relied on, amongst others things, press releases being sent out. We had a set opening date, so these had to be sent before press deadlines for issues going out before the opening. Press releases would be written once services are designed etc etc. There's a critical path that clearly says 'this must be done by that date to ensure the rest of the tasks can happen'. As you can imagine, when designed the Olympic Stadium, for example a critical path would be essential when such a vast and complex set of tasks had to be done (and the major delays occurred because so many tasks could not be started until others had been finished!)
4. Make sure those named in the plan know about their tasks and deadlines. We have a shared drive that everyone can access and update their section of the plan. Most start ups, like I was will be just you, which makes that part nice and easy!
5. Do and update. Once you've written your plan, don't sit back feeling smug at what you've achieved. I'm going to be a little unfair and say, creating a plan is not really achieving anything. It's a means to and end, the achievement comes in the ticking off of tasks, the active reworking and editing of the plan in response to changes, lessons learnt, new developments, ideas and those inevitable catastrophes.
My key points on this subject would be:
Don't use a plan a means to procrastinate doing what you set out to do. If you keep creating plans and never doing anything with them, the problem probably isn't plan.
Don't be afraid to change the plan, as with life, things doing always go to... err, plan! Adapt and move with the project but...
Do set deadlines and keep to them as best you can, the plan should drive results.
I hope that's helpful and I'd really appreciate any comments!
Thank you,
Lynsey
