Developing plans that are easy for all team members to understand and implement is not easy.  However without a workable plan, a lot of time and effort is wasted trying to achieve a task goal.

The core of team planning is to develop and complete a list of all the items/To Do’s that will achieve the task goal.  The list is usually developed in a team meeting and hopefully each team member then manages and does what they need to do.

Communications and more meetings are used to keep the master list up-to-date and to ensure that team members have completed their To Do’s.  This sounds easy, but when each team member has many tasks, the time and effort required to manually coordinate To Do’s is rarely available.

A simple Plan-on-a-Page has been shown to be an easy way to create and manage a team master list of To Do’s.  In addition to the list of To Do’s, the Plan-on-a-Page includes the plan context (task dates, goal, assumptions, risks, objectives), the person responsible for each To Do and other team members who need to assist, the stakeholders and resources.  This additional information makes the plan understandable and more likely to be implemented by team members as intended.

For larger plans, a simple task tree can be employed to show how a number of Plans-on-a-Page fit together.  The important point is that each Plan-on-a-Page is a complete standalone plan that a specific team can understand, own and implement. 

For a Free Plan-on-a-Page template and information about Plan-on-a-Page software, visit www.me2team.com .