Learning to Plan

At Appiphony planning is one of our core values because we believe great work demands it. Too often planning is skipped due to external forces or our own impulses pushing us to just start showing progress. This is a trap, the truth is that planning is progress and visualizing the journey toward our goal actually increases our chance of achieving it.

Planning becomes even more critical in a team setting. The thoughtfulness and discipline required to plan builds caring into our work, promotes shared understanding and lays the foundation for collaboration. If we all see the same path forward we all become better positioned to help each other accomplish the goal. We also acknowledge that we only move as fast as the slowest team member and thus staying coordinated is paramount to the plan’s success.

Below is Appiphony’s approach to planning. We hope it serves you as well as it has served us.

What’s required to plan

• 45 minutes
• 1 person taking ownership
• Thoughtfulness
• Willingness to attack the hard stuff first
• Willingness to reach out to others and pull them into the process

Defining the goal

Start with the goal in mind by answering these questions:

1. Who are we trying to make successful?
2. Why is success important to them?
3. What does success look like to them?
4. When must they succeed by?

Building the plan

Perform the following with the team that is accountable for the work:

1. Take inventory by creating an ordered list by visualizing everything that needs to happen to accomplish the goal.
2. Pull risk forward by identifying the most challenging items and prioritizing them up the list as far as possible while accounting for dependencies.
3. Apply time and resources by mapping each item to a calendar and assigning resources with consideration for required effort, vacations and holidays.
4. Set milestones by defining logical points to present progress and adjust the plan if needed.

Executing the plan

Take your plan and put it into action by doing the following:

1. Socialize the plan with all participants and stakeholders.
2. Publish the plan somewhere that all participants can access.
3. Track the work against the plan.
4. Adjust the plan as new information presents itself and notify everyone of the changes.

Be sure to celebrate your win once you succeed. Then, take time to hold a retrospective with all participants and reflect on how things went. Focus on what you should do more of but also what you should stop doing. Make sure everyone participates and has a voice. You will find planning takes discipline and time, but is worth the effort because of the clarity it provides everyone in the process, team work it promotes and results it delivers. Good luck!