Project planning in 8 minutes or less
You have something you’re working on, and you’d like it to go well. This seems reasonable, if we’re working on something we usually hope it will go well.
What if you could increase the chances of success, improve the enjoyment of the people working on it, and give your brain a bit more of a rest with just 8 minutes and a piece of paper (or a Google doc)?
You can! It’s a project-lite plan!
I’m not talking about some big waterfall diagram or Gantt chart, but something that briefly describes the goals, what success looks like, how you’ll measure it, what is out of scope for the project, and who generally is doing what.
Like many things the act of making the plan is the most important part, because it gives you the space and time to think about things in advance, so you can focus on the right things. Especially if this is a project with other people, it serves as a communication tool. In creating the plan you can figure out if you have the same goals and be clear on who is doing what, and directing work in the right direction. Many projects fail because the people working together on it weren’t aligned on the goals or what success looks like in the first place. So you’re arguing over wording in an email half-way through the project, when the issue isn’t really the wording, but that you’re trying to do two different things.
That’s why this project planning is ‘8 minutes or less’. It’s not meant to be a detailed map. Take a breath, and spend 8 minutes (ok probably more as you get started with project plans, but you’ll get faster) and write down a plan that you can share with your team or collaborators. It won’t be perfect! Perfect is not the point, in fact, please don’t aim for that! It’s a starting point for getting to a shared understanding (even if that shared understanding is with yourself).
So, what does this ‘project lite’ planning look like? It’s a template with 8 fields.
Project title: Give the project a descriptive title
Project roles: Who is involved in this project and what are their roles?
Motivation: What is the background, why are we doing this project? What are things we should be thinking about?
Goals: What are the goals? What does success look like? How will we measure success? It’s important to include goals for metrics, even if qualitative, when evaluating projects.
Anti-aims: What is not a part of this project?
Proposal: How will you do this work? A short list of ideas, tasks and milestones.
Communications: What are the different stakeholder groups and what are the associated key messages? Do not skip this one! The communication is a part of a successful plan, not an afterthought.
Resources needed: What resources will you need - tools, budget, etc?
And that’s it! Obviously some of these might be harder to answer than others, but that’s the point. You need the answers to get the results you’re looking for.
Now, certainly you could argue that you or others have successfully completed projects without a plan. But is that really true? Was the plan in your head or someone else’s? Maybe then it went well, or you found yourself wondering why other people didn’t get it along the way, or you needed to constantly argue your point of view. Did you do something, but you’re not sure of the impact it had? Or you thought it should have had a bigger impact? How did you and others feel while you were working on that project, frantic or in control?
A quick project plan won’t make all of these things immediately better. If you’re talking about this with a team, it will go better if you have spaces where people feel like they can share and contribute. There’s a lot of next steps on execution, and bigger projects or teams need more planning, but it’s a starting place.
If you like Google docs like I do, here’s a project planning template you can use to get started.
Try it for your next project, and see if and what shifts for you and your team.