The Work Plan: Organizing and Managing Your Project Tasks

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:

•   List the reasons for developing a work plan to manage your problem-solving activities.

•   List four indicators of when you really need a work plan.

•   Identify the critical elements of a work plan.

THE PURPOSE OF A WORK PLAN

A work plan is an invaluable tool for managing a project, no matter how big or small the project is. It identifies the activities that need to be completed to accomplish the project goals, the deadlines for completing the activities, and the resources required to complete them. Ever since humans developed the ability to reason, to think about the link between a set of activities and a desired result, people have developed work plans to organize their activities. We know that the Egyptians used work plans to organize and manage the construction of pyramids, which were complex projects that involved huge amounts of money, materials, and people over many years. On a much smaller scale, every time you have a party, you develop and follow a work plan. Whether your project involves working on many tasks over a long period or completing only a few tasks in a day, it’s helpful to take the time to examine your task list carefully, estimate how long it will take you to complete each task, think about which task needs to get done before you can move on to the next task, and identify any resources you will need to get each task done. You can save valuable time and work more efficiently if you take the time to plan before you start working.

Of course, not every project is as big as Andrea’s project. As you can see, Andrea and her work group will need to develop a fairly complex and integrated work plan to be sure that they work effectively together. Your projects might not be nearly as complicated or involve anyone else but yourself. So how do you know if you need a project work plan? You can be sure that your boss won’t be happy if you spend a day developing a work plan for a project that’s only going to take a couple of hours to complete.

The basic rule is that it’s worthwhile to spend the time developing a project work plan if accomplishing your objective will require any one of the following work-plan criteria: (1) a significant amount of your time, (2) a significant amount of money or materials, (3) more than one person to work on it, or (4) more than three simple tasks to complete it.

If you apply the work-plan criteria to your project and are still having difficulty deciding whether or not you need to develop a work plan, try thinking about your project as a trip. If your project-objective statement includes your destination, and your task list tells you the places you need to go to get there, then the work plan should include your itinerary (the schedule of when you should arrive at and leave each place in order to make it to your final destination on time). If you’re only going to go to the store to get milk, and you need to stop at the bank to get money first, you don’t need a detailed itinerary. But if you’re going to a family reunion and you have offered to pick up and bring all of the family’s ten aunts and uncles to the reunion in your van, you will need to plan your route carefully and tell each one of them when you will be picking them up so they can be ready.

Which of the following projects might not need a work plan?

1.   Joyce is a lab technician in a biotech research firm. Because no one in the lab can ever find his or her own safety goggles on the pegboard, Joyce’s boss asks her to solve the problem. She decides to put name tags on everyone’s goggles and put name labels on the pegboard.

2.   Tim is a firefighter. He looks at his calendar and realizes that it’s time to give his annual fire safety lecture to the kindergarten class in town.

3.   Jim and his brother Tom own a laundry they inherited from their father. The old steam press has been breaking down frequently and they decide it’s time to invest in new equipment, but they have no idea of what equipment is on the market or how much it will cost.

4.   In addition to her full-time job, Jane has just started working part-time for a cartoonist who has a small, mail-order catalog business that sells books, posters, mugs, and T-shirts. They don’t seem to have enough of the right products in inventory (which is kept on Jane’s back porch) and have an oversupply of items that aren’t very popular. Jane decides to review the sales patterns for the past 3 years and work with the cartoonist to restructure their ordering schedule and inventory to correspond to seasonal demands.

5.   Ethan works in the financial aid office of a large university. Students have been complaining about the amount of paperwork they need to fill out and the amount of time it takes for them to get final notification of their financial aid grant awards. Ethan’s boss asks him to develop recommendations for reducing the paperwork and notification time frame.

6.   Elizabeth owns a toy store. She thought she had ordered enough Sally dolls in June to meet the holiday rush, but she discovers that her sales assistant forgot to tell her that they had sold an unusually high amount of dolls in August, due to the manufacturer’s successful new marketing campaign. She needs to call her suppliers to see if they can get her a shipment in time.

Don’t worry if you weren’t positive about which of these projects really don’t need work plans. It will take practice before you can be confident about your ability to evaluate a project’s complexity. Also, if you are assigned a project at work, your boss can help you to decide whether or not you need a work plan. In the previous examples, three of the projects don’t seem to meet any of the criteria for needing a work plan:

1.   Joyce’s safety goggles-labeling project. (It won’t take long, involve anyone else, or cost very much, and the project consists of two simple tasks—label the goggles and label the pegboard.)

2.   Tim’s fire safety-lecture project. (It won’t take long to prepare, involve anyone else, or cost very much, and the project consists of three simple tasks—schedule the lecture, find his lecture materials from last year, and deliver the lecture.)

6.   Elizabeth’s Sally doll-ordering project. (It won’t take long, involve anyone else, or cost very much, and the project consists of one simple task—calling her supplier.)

Notice that the importance or urgency of a project has very little to do with whether or not you need a work plan. Elizabeth needs to get on the phone right away, or she’ll lose her holiday customers. However, she doesn’t need much planning to organize her activities. Jim and Tom have been getting along fine by repairing the old steam press, but their investment in new equipment will require them to spend a significant amount of money, and it will take time to evaluate, select, and install the equipment that’s appropriate for their business.

THE ELEMENTS OF A WORK PLAN: TASK ANALYSIS

Once you have determined that you need a work plan for your project, you will need to spend some time reviewing and organizing the tasks on your task list. In order to develop a work plan, you will need to be able to identify the following:

•   The activities you need to undertake to complete each task (subtasks)

•   How much time each task will take (task time frame)

•   When the task should begin

•   When the task should be completed (task time frame)

•   Which tasks are dependent on other tasks before you can begin them (task relationships)

•   The sequence of the project tasks (task number)

•   The person(s) responsible for completing each task (staff assignments)

•   Project milestones.

This is called task analysis. It involves evaluating and understanding all of the components, resource requirements, and ramifications of each task in a project. The following sections will review the first seven elements of task analysis. We’ll discuss project milestones in the next chapter.

In order to analyze and organize the information you have about your project tasks, you will need to record the information in a format that’s easy to look at and work with. After you’ve had some practice, you’ll probably want to develop your own task-analysis form. In the meantime, you can try using the form we’ve provided in this book (see Exhibit 7–1).

Let’s try using the task-analysis form with one of our earlier project examples. Remember Jim and Tom, who needed to purchase some new steam press equipment for their laundry? They decided they wanted to be able to have the new steam press in full operation by the middle of February, and they wanted to avoid losing any more days of operation than are absolutely essential when they shift to using the new press. It’s now August. They close the laundry every year in January to give themselves and their employees a vacation. They haven’t yet researched how much the press will cost, but they estimate they can raise approximately $20,000 in financing to purchase the new equipment. Tom and Jim developed the following project-objective statement and task list.

Objective

Purchase, install, and implement a new steam press, for a total cost of $20,000, by mid-February, without losing any more days of operation than are absolutely necessary.

Task List

•   Select new steam press

•   Establish cost and performance criteria for the new equipment

•   Install new steam press

•   Purchase new steam press

•   Train employees to use new steam press

•   Obtain financing for purchasing new steam press

You can see that these tasks aren’t in any order yet. Tom and Jim needed to analyze their tasks, both to determine the best sequence and to determine who should be responsible for each task. They began by filling out a separate task-analysis form for each task. Let’s try it with the first task on their list.

Select new steam press

Task sequence number: ___________

(Because they don’t yet know the order of tasks, Tom and Jim skipped the task sequence number temporarily. They’ll come back and fill that in later.)

Now the only thing Tom and Jim need to do is set a completion date for this task. First they analyze task number 1: Establish cost and performance criteria, and determine that it will take about half a day to complete before they can get started on task 2. They’re ready to begin tomorrow morning, so they decide they can get task 2 completed by the end of August. They go back and fill in August 2 under 3b. and August 31 under 3c.

Tom and Jim have almost completed their work plan. By the time they have filled out a task-analysis form for each task on their list, they will have all the elements of a work plan: task order, subtasks, task time frames, task-dependency relationships, staff assignments, and project milestones.

Is all this work really necessary? Let’s look at Metropolitan Toys as an example. After Andrea’s work group had analyzed the delayed delivery problem, they realized they had work to do in two major areas: production and packaging. They developed a clear project-objective statement: Develop and implement new production and delivery processes and schedules by October, working with an interdepartmental work group, to ensure that the Super Karate Frogs can be produced and delivered to Metropolitan’s customers on a reliable schedule in time for the holiday season.

Then they developed a task list to break the project down into manageable components and evaluated each task to be sure that it was essential to getting the job done. Since everyone agreed on the tasks, they decided that each of them could go ahead individually and start to work on the tasks that involved his or her own department.

Andrea was anxious to get started and show her boss that she was working on the project. So she got to work on the task that fell in her area: developing new specifications for Metropolitan’s shipping contract with the Acme Trucking Company. She got estimates from the marketing department about the size of the new oversized shipping cartons and worked with the manager of Acme Trucking to negotiate new contract specifications. But when she brought them to her boss for his sign-off, he told her that he had just learned in a senior staff meeting that the production and marketing departments had just finished designing a new shape and size shipping carton that would improve the efficiency of the packaging process.

Andrea had to start all over again. If she and the members of her work group had identified the dependency relationships between project tasks and established some task time frames, she might have waited to begin working on her task until marketing and production had finished redesigning the shipping cartons.

Throughout history, people have used work plans to organize and manage their activities. A carefully developed work plan can help you save valuable time and use your resources efficiently. You don’t need a work plan for every project. A simple way to determine whether you need to develop a work plan is to judge the project against the following criteria:

•   It will take a significant amount of your time to complete it.

•   It will require a significant amount of materials or money.

•   The project will need more than one person to work on it.

•   The project consists of more than three simple tasks.

If any one of these criteria applies to your project, you should consider developing a work plan to help you organize and manage it.

The process of developing a work plan is called task analysis, which involves reviewing and organizing project tasks to identify the project work-plan elements: task order, subtasks, task time frames, task-dependency relationships, staff assignments, and project milestones.

To analyze and organize your project tasks, you will need to record this information in a format that’s easy to look at and work with. We’ve provided a sample task-analysis form in this book to get you started. Eventually, you’ll probably want to design your own form.