To get plans done successfully, you need to first develop a plan that is easy to understand.  Then you need to get people to work together to implement the plan.

This sounds easy, but it can be very difficult to achieve in practice.  Developing a plan that is understandable and doable for everyone involved is usually time consuming and stressful.  But it doesn’t need to be.

 Plans take time and effort to develop and implement, but this is a good investment. If you can also save time, effort and stress by reusing a plan, then the investment has even more value.

Ideally, a plan that will be reused should document the goal; context; who did what, when and with whom; and the specific resources that were needed.

Accountability cannot exist without proper accounting practices; in other words, an absence of accounting means an absence of accountability” – Wikipedia entry on Accountability.

Just as financial accountability requires records of financial transactions; personal, team and organisational accountability requires records of what has been done to achieve goals.  Both financial accountability, and personal, team and organisational accountability requires progressive records in context, because people quickly forget what needs to happen or what has actually happened
 

Service providers need an efficient interaction with clients to get work done and minimize stress. But both service providers and their clients have many competing priorities that make productive interactions hard to sustain. 

One of the greatest challenges is getting on and staying on the same sheet of music. Any lack of clarity about what needs to be done and who is going to do it, wastes time and effort and builds stress.

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.  A simple Plan-on-a-Page has been shown to be an easy way to create and manage a team plan.

The Plan-on-a-Page template has been used by tens of thousands of people in over 175 countries.   The feedback has been that even people with no management training can create a workable plan in around 10 minutes.

There are a lot of critical management processes that can be significantly improved by using technology to automate all or parts of the process.  At TASKey and working with our clients, we have found that using software to automate and coordinate many enabling management processes saves time and effort, reduces stress, and achieves goals faster.

It can be argued that the greatest weakness in workplaces is the inability of relevant people to keep shared tasks and To Do’s synchronised. This inability wastes a lot of time and effort, causes stress, strains interpersonal relationships, and constrains productivity.

Most people use some form of a To Do list to remember and decide what they need to do next. The problem with To Do lists is they take a lot of time and effort to create and keep updated.  TASKey has developed smart To Do software that automatically keeps your To Do list synchronized with agreed plans, meeting actions and other relevant peoples’ To Do lists. 

Cultural change happens one person at a time, so everyone needs to know what is happening and what they need to do. Positive accountability ensures that each person knows what they need to do to contribute to organisational change and keeps relevant people informed about actual progress.