Step 6: Craft a Plan
for Implementing
Your Idea

Once you’ve selected the best alternative and thought about how to manage its risks, your work isn’t done. You still need to craft a plan for implementing your idea. For this step, it’s important to

• Understand the purpose of an implementation plan

• List your milestones

• Communicate with decision makers about your progress

• Identify resources you’ll need to carry out your proposed course of action

• Clarify who will do what to implement your alternative

• Indicate when the alternative will generate the intended benefits

• Track your results

In the pages that follow, we explore each of these tasks in greater depth.

Understanding the purpose of an implementation plan

Your implementation plan lays out how you intend to track your progress and measure your success if your proposed solution is put into action. Many managers think of an implementation plan as a list of action items, due dates, and the people responsible for them. Decision makers reading your business case will certainly want to know this information. But they’ll also want to know the following:

• The primary milestones

• The individuals responsible/accountable for each milestone

• The resources required to reach each milestone

• Dates when the company will see the benefits of your recommended course of action

• Impacts on the company’s expense and headcount budgets

• Increases in revenue

• Your plan for demonstrating that the solution’s intended results have been realized

Keep in mind that while decision makers will want to understand each of your milestones to ensure that your project is feasible, they do not need the details of how you will accomplish each milestone.

Listing your milestones

Begin developing your implementation plan by listing the major steps needed to carry out your solution. (Resist any urge to write down every little detail of your project plan.) These major steps are your milestones. Include notes about how you plan to address any risks. For example, document that you will start with a pilot training project or use a skilled negotiator in the contract phase.

If there are definable phases to the project, consider listing your milestones by phase. In the Satellite example, this list would take the following form:

• Phase 1 (1 month): Hire the consultant using the VP of procurement to negotiate the contract.

• Phase 2 (6 months): Develop training, conduct pilot training, evaluate pilot, and collect sales results.

• Phase 3 (3 months): Roll out training to all salespeople and sales coaches.

• Phase 4 (1 month): Track results; forecast improvement in sales, customer value, and employee turnover to establish business results targets for the next year.

• Phase 5 (ongoing): Modify financial targets for sales on an ongoing basis.

Communicating with decision makers

Depending on the nature of your proposal, you may also want to establish explicit check-in points with decision makers to assess progress toward your stated goals. These check-in meetings usually occur after completion of a project phase. During the meetings, decision makers review the status of your project and advise you on any needed midcourse corrections.

When you present your milestones to decision makers, expect that they will want the project done much sooner than your estimated final delivery date. Anticipate negotiations about the time frame. Be prepared with a backup plan for how you could complete phases more quickly, or develop a convincing argument for why accelerating the project implementation would be too risky and would not achieve the intended results.

Identifying resources you’ll need

Now ask yourself what resources you’ll need at each project phase. For instance, in the Satellite scenario, Sydney might expect to need someone from the procurement group to develop and monitor the contract between Satellite and the consulting firm. She will also need $2 million added to her budget to pay for the consulting contract.

Show any movement of budget dollars and headcount as a step in your project plan. Otherwise, it may be overlooked, or decision makers may assume you will fund the project from your current budget.

Clarifying responsibilities

Many projects do not succeed because managers fail to clarify who will be accountable for each milestone and to get a commitment from these individuals. To illustrate, Sydney knows she’ll need someone from the procurement group to negotiate the consulting contract. But if she doesn’t confirm with the department up front that they can provide someone, she may be left empty-handed when the contract negotiation phase begins.

In your implementation plan, name the individuals who will do each phase of the work. Also indicate who will be responsible for ensuring that each phase of the project realizes its intended results in terms of costs, revenues, benefits, and deliverables. (More than one person may share this responsibility.)

When reviewing your business plan, decision makers will also want to determine what burdens they’ll have to shoulder in order for your proposed solution to succeed. For example, in the Satellite scenario, the sales group would need to increase its forecasted revenue commitments to justify the cost of hiring the consulting firm.

Indicating expected payoff

Decision makers reviewing your business case want to know when they can expect your solution to pay off—that is, to generate the promised benefits. To answer this question, look at your data and clearly identify the range of impacts you expect to see during implementation of your solution.

For instance, Sydney expects sales revenue to increase by $7 million once her solution is implemented. Does she anticipate it will rise immediately? Probably not. More likely, she expects it to be flat at first. She believes that 10 percent of the annualized $7 million (or $175,000) will be realized in the third quarter and 30 percent (or $525,000) in the fourth quarter of year 1, 60 percent in year 2 ($4.2 million), and the full $7 million at the end of year 3.

In estimating payoff dates, remember to plan for a lag between the time when results occur and when they are recorded. Although your plan might generate the expected results during the expected period, those results may not get recorded in your company’s performance management system until the following period.

Tracking your results

The projections in your implementation plan will help you sell your case to decision makers. They will also provide benchmarks for evaluating your project’s effectiveness once it’s implemented.

If your recommended solution receives the go-ahead, your organization will want you to regularly report on the project’s successes and shortfalls. By keeping track of your estimated due dates versus the actual delivery dates, as well as estimated benefits versus actual benefits, you will generate the data you’ll need to garner support for your project through each of its milestones.

Tracking your project’s results will also help you strengthen your ability to build sound business cases and lead projects. To illustrate, once your project rolls into action, it may generate results that far exceed your expectations—signaling that you might have been too conservative in your business case. Or, you could see results that fall far short of your forecasts—suggesting that you may have been overly ambitious.

Whether your results prove better or worse than your expectations, take time to identify the causes behind any major deviation from your business case. By understanding what went wrong, you can learn what to do differently in the future. And by identifying what worked, you derive successful practices to use in subsequent efforts.

See “Tips for creating an implementation plan” for additional helpful guidance on this step in developing a business case.