praxis: Anjali Sastry's blog

Workplans

We talked in class about the inescapable tradeoffs in any team planning effort—for instance, too much detail can be as bad as too little detail in your workplan. And as you go, your team faces tradeoffs in managing stakeholder engagement (who gets to have a say in the specifics of what you plan to do, and how to they participate? If stakeholder participation is necessary for buy-in, how do you ensure your plan is manageable and under your own control?). There are some unique challenges to projects for learning: after all, your professor and TA are also stakeholders, and need to be managed too. They are, of course, also a resource, but like other stakeholders, if they are not kept informed, they may not be as useful as they could be. What’s your plan for managing stakeholders?

Another key issue to consider: how flexible is your workplan? Have you built in the opportunities for your team to revisit the entiree project plan at a couple of crucial points? When are these points, and have you planned your work so that you will have the data you need to make the needed revisions at that point?

Web resources for project management, workplanning, and action planning abound. Many of you have used structured techniques and software tools (e.g. software like Microsoft Project; online, I have used 37 signals’ basecamp and backpack for larger and smaller projects, respectively). Some of the traditional tools for project management include the Gantt chart, which maps dependencies (example), and the more complex network-based PERT chart (which draws on an approach called the critical path method), but these of course need to be embedded in a process that makes sense.

To help you think about your project workplanning process, I thought I’d share a couple of resources that I found online. Note that these each come from a specific domain, and that you will need to adapt the approach to one that works for your team.

My first resource is a set of basic guidelines for planning that appear on a site called Free Management Library. I can’t vouch that this is a definitive and fully referenced site, but I think it’s likely to be a useful place to explore and to start learning more about planning from a management point of view.

Every year I direct students to the work of Scott Berkun. This chapter, How to Figure Out What to Do, excerpted from one of his book, may be overkill for some, and will require translation from his domain to yours, but may be useful for many of you. I think it’s a good read. Here’s a shorter blog post on critical thinking that has a very similar flavor to some of our discussions in class. He may be approaching problem definition from a design standpoint, but the ideas apply to projects for change, too.

More resources come from public-sector organizations that support others’ projects (later on, we shall look at how grant-makers are also doing this when we consider the theory of change framework). Without making an evaluation of the organizations behind these resrouces, I thought I’d share a couple.  Civicus, an organization dedicated to infusing participation into projects, offers a useful action planning toolkit. And New Hampshire state’s Endowment for Health shares an online slide deck that walks potential grant applicants through a useful list of issues to consider as they devise a workplan.

For a more explicitly instructional view of projects, here’s the introductory chapter of a text on workplanning, Getting Started in Project Management (by Karen Tate, PMP and Paula K. Martin, 2001, Wiley).

Finally, I’m asking for your feedback to be posted as a comment. What approaches have you used that work well? What tools are useful? If you’d rather weigh in on a related discussion about the role of proejcts in management education, take a look at this blog post, Do we need a project project? and add a comment about that here instead.