Just tell me what is happening and what you want me to do. This is the common request of most people who need to contribute to a change. But it is rarely answered in enough detail for a person to know what is happening and what they need to do.
Most changes are delivered top down in terms of broad direction with little detail on exactly what a person needs to do to contribute. Sometimes it is unclear if a person needs to do anything or even if they are affected.
To decide on the best use of their time, a person needs to know exactly what they are expected to do when and with whom. With this information they can see how their contribution to the change fits in with everything else they are doing.
Unfortunately without knowing exactly what is required, people are more likely to focus on urgent work being sought by the people around them. So unless change contributions are clear, there is little chance of the work being done, until it becomes urgent (usually in the form of a crisis).
So how can people be given the information they need to effectively contribute? There needs to be a simple process to connect strategic change to personal actions. TASKey has been working on a solution for many years. The key is to provide explicit unbroken connections between strategies and what is actually being done.
It has been suggested that the project management’s work breakdown structure (WBS) provides a logical framework for connecting actions to strategies. However while WBS provides a great high level framework of tasks, it quickly becomes unmanageable at the personal action/ToDo level.
TASKey has found that a combination of WBS, and flat lists of actions that define a simple workflow, provides a workable way to connect actions to strategies. The glue that holds a WBS task and a list of actions together is a simple plan template.
The importance of explicit plans cannot be underestimated. Without plans people are forced to make it up as they go along. This is great for flexibility, but a very inefficient way to get work done.
Over 10 years ago, TASKey developed a simple one page plan template that includes all the critical pieces of information required for an understandable and workable plan. The fast planning template is easy to to use and usually takes about 10 minutes to complete.
The template has been used in over 175 countries by thousands of people. A free paper based PDF copy of the template is available at
www.me2team.com.
Also available is web software that integrates WBS, flat lists and the fast planning template to keep people informed about what is happening and what they need to do. The software makes it easy for many people to drive and successfully implement changes.