Welcome to this Business Excellence Article.
I observe many organizations that start their improvement work without a thorough plan. They start with a fuzzy decision about “making some improvements”, but they do not follow it up by creating the right conditions for the work to be successful. Therefore the person who takes on the responsibility will be unlikely to succeed with the project.
In order to create the right environment for improvement work you need to make the decision known within the organization. You also need to make sure that you and the other leaders within the organization support the work. The project manager who takes on the assignment must feel this commitment from the management team.
The project manger must start the project by planning what to do. The plan must contain the work to be done, first represented as a Pert-diagram and from there in time laid out in a Gantt chart.
I usually stress the fact that it is best to use both, in order to first be able to see the relationship between the activities and to understand what can be done in parallel, alongside whatever actions need to be taken before others. Thereafter it is possible to plan it out in terms of time in order to find out how long the project is going to take.
When you know WHAT to do and HOW to do it, you can start to talk about WHO is going to do it. A lot of organizations start, both in their daily work (processes) and in their projects with whom and then continues with what. Who will perform the activities must be related to the skills needed.
Resources must be secured, otherwise you can not be sure that the plan will be executed as described.
The plan must be communicated to the leader that ordered the improvement project in order to make sure that they are committed to it. The leader then makes the decision to execute the plan if it is deemed to be sound.
The management team must then prepare the organization for the project by communicating the importance of the project and the need for total support. Things are going to happen along the way and it is then important to have the organization prepared and the priorities set.
Without making a good and solid plan most projects fail. You might wonder what criteria it fails against, as there is no plan, but it is safe to say that the project will not be accomplishing what was expected of it.
When you are ready to start your improvement project, make sure that you have everything in place to succeed. Suffice to say – make a plan!
“If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail!” this is a true quote that is accredited by many people.
