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Develop a list of project tasks and capture those tasks on an action register and Gantt Chart.
Implement a work plan.
Communicate effectively with your sponsor to align on tasks, goals, and results.
Align all tasks with deliverables.
Manage all tasks every week using an action register and a Gantt chart.
After meeting with your client, you now know what the deliverables are and what the company wants, so why not just get to work on creating the deliverables?
The height of your success is measured by the depth of your planning.
This is an expansive project! For a Team-Based project, the work plan is a fourteen-week, 500–700 hour-long project that five different people are working to complete. For individual intern projects, there will also be a large number of hours and likely the need to coordinate work plans with co-workers. For company projects that require hundreds of hours and must be completed on schedule, companies create work plans and Gantt charts. They lay out all the tasks that must be completed for the project. These projects are too complex to let things flow and create tasks as they come. They take more management and more planning.
To be effective and create deliverables that will make the most impact, you need to have a work plan. The goal is not to just finish but to access the full potential of your team's/co-worker’s skills, time, and combined efforts. It is standard in the professional world to develop a work plan. This is your chance to explore this new skill and develop it enough to put it onto your resume confidently!
A work plan is a roadmap to a successful project. It should include a list of the tasks necessary to meet the project deliverables, and it should list the deliverables according to the critical path process.
A work plan can be represented in the following documents:
Task list associated with each deliverable
Action register
Gantt chart
We will learn about all three of these documents later in this chapter.
A fully developed work plan is a highly valuable channel of communication among team members/co-workers and with the sponsor. Utilize the work plan to create transparency in expectations and progress.
Among Team Members/Co-Workers: Each member of the team has access to the work plan. As responsibilities and tasks are assigned among the group, the work plan can be used as a record-keeping tool for assignments during meetings. It should be used for accountability checks and status updates as you meet, encouraging awareness and transparency of each member's efforts.
Sponsor and Team/Individual Interns: The sponsor will also have access to your work plan. As deliverables are defined, this project plan should be used to clarify to the sponsor that their expectations are being met. Teams/Individual interns with a professional mindset will share their work plan whenever they meet with their sponsor to display the progress made and work done each week. When properly done, little room is left for the development of misunderstandings between the sponsor and the team/intern.
Deliverables: Identify and record every measurable outcome your team is hoping to accomplish. This can be based on your engagement letter.
Tasks: Include all the high-level action items required to complete your deliverables.
Sub-Tasks Breakdown: Take all your tasks and break them into smaller lists of tasks. This is to help visualize everything that needs to happen.
Task Assignments: The strongest workflows allow for maximizing each team member's/co-worker’s time and also for multiple items to be progressing at once. Determine which team member/co-worker will take responsibility for each task. Some tasks are done by the entire team (all co-workers), while others need the focus of only one or more members.
Timeline and Dates: A timeline is key with work plans. Give start/end dates for each task, as well as dates for the midterm and final presentations. How long will each task take? In what order will each task need to be completed? Will we have enough time to complete the current deliverables, or too much? Your timeline projections should give you insights into these questions.
Throughout this chapter, you will learn how to create a work plan, communicate that plan effectively with your sponsor, and move forward with faith when your tasks are unknown or intimidating.
In the following video, Roger McCarty discusses the steps you should take to develop your work plan:
Roger McCarty: So you and your team have now developed a meeting of the minds with the company sponsor where you have identified the deliverables and the work plan and the work that you're going to do for the company. Now you need to create the activities and elements of the project that you and your teammates will work on. We call this a work plan.
In developing a work plan, we have to look at what does the sponsor already have to support the deliverables. You don't want to go about recreating the wheel; you don't want to restart everything over from scratch. Whatever they have in place, you want to be able to take advantage of. So ask them toward each of the deliverables that you've developed, what does the sponsor already have?
Second, you want to determine, is there a budget or resources that are available to support the team in developing the deliverables? Will there be people at the company? Will there be things that you can do and have resources to have access to databases if you need to spend money? Is there a budget necessary to help you succeed at that? Get clarification on all of these things early; never surprise your sponsor with any use of resources or funds that they haven't approved.
Okay, now what information is required to develop the deliverables to make the sponsor's decision? That's really one of the big questions. So we've got the deliverable that we're trying to get at, but how do you determine that you've met the deliverable? What information do you need to be able to do that? This is called backcasting. We'll talk about it a little bit more in an example, but you're looking to the end of what a finished project looks like and then working backwards to what you have to do to get there. So we've identified the deliverable, and now we're looking at the information necessary to create that deliverable for the sponsor.
You always want to look at what level of certainty is required to meet that deliverable. If you're looking for accuracy at point zero zero zero four percent accuracy, that's going to cost a lot more time and resources and money to create that level of accuracy. And if all you really need is ninety percent accuracy and that's good enough to make the decision, you want to keep that level of effort toward just a ninety percent accuracy.
Now, what critical assumptions can be made without further validation? You can't do the whole world, so you want to focus on what it is that you already know, what you're already comfortable with, that you don't have to go back and recreate because you have limited time and resources to get things done. Therefore, what analysis tools will be required? So to reach that level of information accuracy on the factors that are the most important factors to be worked on, what tools will get you that level of accuracy and the information necessary to make the decision?
Now as you continue on, we're going to look at what data is going to be required to perform that analysis. So what kind of data are you gonna have to go gather, whether it be through secondary research or primary research or surveys or whatever you're doing? What kind of data do you need to be able to do the survey? Then we'll look at where will you get the data? What's already available from the sponsor and what are you going to have to go find?
Now when you're going to go find things, the first thing to recognize is never get primary research first. It is always harder and more difficult to do and takes more resources. You want to stand on the shoulders of giants; you want to find out what other people have already done the work on. So you want to do secondary research; you want to use the library databases. We have a wonderful Business Library link in your course materials that links you out to the databases in the library that give you access to information that will meet your needs. We also have the internet in general and other resources you can use to find people who have already accessed this information and have put the data together so that you don't have to recreate it from scratch. It's always better to use secondary research first.
Now to the extent that you can't find secondary research, you're going to have to use primary data collection. Now this could be through expert interviews, through focus groups, through surveys, and other methods where you go out and physically gather information. You could do ethnographic research where you videotape people utilizing your products to understand how they access and use them. There's all sorts of different tools that you can use which are primary tools to gather data.
Now what is your work plan to get the primary and the secondary data? Where are you going to find it? Who's going to work on it? How will you access that data? What's your plan to accomplish that?
Then what is your timeline to gather the data, to perform the analysis, to develop conclusions, recommendations, and to communicate the deliverables? All of this information needs to be part of your work plan so that you have a coherent timeline for how all of this is going to happen.
And then who will be responsible for each required activity? Which team member or team members will be working on each element of the work plan so that you'll know what's going to happen and when it's going to happen?
And then lastly, when will each activity be completed? You may need a critical path analysis to determine the sequence and ordering of your activities so that you have the most concise and efficient timeline to meet the work plan outcomes.
Now let me just give you an example of this process of what we've been doing. So let's say that what you're trying to find at this point is a deliverable that is what do my customers, what attributes do my customers use to make a decision? What are the elements, the activities that they do, how do they choose between factors and attributes of my product versus my competitor's product? How do they make the decision to buy my product or somebody else's? So that's our deliverable is how do customers make a decision? That's what we're looking for, that's the most important thing.
Now where do we start? Remember, that's the deliverable, that's what we're trying to get at. So what we're going to say is the first step that we're going to work on is we're going to look at this question of what's my, how do I have confidence that I've made a decision? The only way you can have confidence that a target audience has the attributes that you're looking for is to do a survey. Surveys allow you to have a confidence factor for what you're doing. So I am going to have the output of a survey; that will be the tool, the analysis tool is what I'm going to use is the output of the survey which gives me confidence in what it is I'm trying to accomplish.
Now where do I go next? Well, to do a survey I have to create, I have to create an instrument. So first I'm going to create an instrument that I can use to go out and at the same time, I have to come up with a list. And these are normally done in parallel, a list of subjects, in this case, my customers or potential customers, a list of subjects to take the survey.
Now, how do I know what I'm going to put in that survey? How do I know the questions, the scales, the elements that are going to make that survey successful? I'm going to do that by potentially having a focus group who will help me plan the survey. To the extent I don't have to have a focus group, I can also use expert interviews. I can find customers or industry experts to help me interview them to find out what are the factors that I want to include in the survey. How do I know who the experts are and what I need to be asking them? How do I frame my interviews that I'm going to have?
Start with the deliverables of the project and work backward to determine your tasks. The Team Deliverables Manager (or intern) will work with the team (or co-workers) and sponsor to identify these key deliverables. The Team Project Manager (or intern) will work with the team (or co-workers) to develop the task list. Your notes for the task list might look something like this:
Deliverable A
Deliverable B
Deliverable C
Deliverable C
Analysis Plan for Deliverable A
Task 1
Task 2
Task 3
Data Plan for Deliverable A
Task 1
Task 2
Task 3
Analysis Plan for Deliverable B
Task 1
Task 2
Task 3
Data Plan for Deliverable B
Task 1
Task 2
Task 3
Continue with this format to create task lists for each of your deliverables.
An action register is a spreadsheet that has all your tasks on the left column with additional columns with the following headings: Responsible Person, Support People, Start Date, End Date, Current Status, and Completed Date. The Team Project Manager will work with the team to develop the Action Register. Below is an image of what an Action Register might look like.
To ensure a timely and successful completion of a project, you need to 1) assess how much time your deliverables and their subtasks require, 2) determine the resources needed, and 3) figure out in which order the subtasks should be completed. A Gantt chart helps you with all three. Though complicated at first, once completed, it will make your life easier.
Therefore, your Gantt chart should include class requirements as well as tasks related to your project. You should also assign each task a time required, a team member/co-worker responsible for the task, and resources. To make the Gantt chart more helpful, make sure to update the list and make it a habit to update your timeline because things always change along the way. The Project Team Manager (or Individual intern) will help the team/co-workers develop the Gantt Chart. All team members/co-workers will utilize the Gantt chart to report on assignments and monitor progress.
The following is an example of a Gantt chart with assigned timelines:
There are many project planning programs and apps that will create integrated task lists, action registers, and Gantt charts. If you are a student or someone who has Microsoft 365, you probably have access to Microsoft Planner. This app is an excellent resource to create a project plan. Other programs like Microsoft Project, Harvard Project, Monday.com, and Toms Planner are also available to help you create project plans. If you are a student taking an internship class, your institution may provide a project planning tool without charge. If you have graduated, your company or organization may have access to a planning tool, or you could use a free service like Toms Planner.
Developing a work plan can be intimidating. It may require you to plan activities and processes that you have never done before. You may be thinking, "What if I can't do it? What if I fail?"
There is a first time for everything. Your life will be full of doing things for the first time or even doing things you tried before that didn't work. As you develop your work plan you need to be open to the possibilities, prayerfully consider your options, and then move forward without fear. Faith is the antidote for fear. As you have faith in Jesus Christ and what he can do with you, you can have confidence. A wise mother (Dorthy McCarty) once said: "Two people can accomplish anything, as long as one of them is The Lord".
Watch this video by Elder David A. Bedar of the Quorum of the 12 Apostles to see how he proposes that you must take action with Faith for the miracles to occur.
Faith requires action. You and your team/co-workers will need to step into the unknown as you implement your work plan and create your deliverables. Have the faith to follow your work plan to a successful completion. Now go forward and develop a work plan with the faith that you will succeed. And the Lord will help you succeed in your righteous desires.
As you are working on your project you will need to do some research. There are many different data sources you can use to get your information. All of these data sources fall into two categories: primary resources and secondary resources.
You should always start with secondary resources first. Secondary resources include any information available to you through published materials created by someone doing research or an expert in the area for which you are looking for information. These resources have often already gathered the information you are looking for, analyzed it, and drawn conclusions for action. Using secondary resources can greatly reduce the effort necessary to obtain the information required to complete your deliverables. They are the most cost-effective way to do research, and the majority of the work has already been done for you. Your task will be reviewing all the relevant data and finding what will be most relevant to your project. Secondary resources allow you to review data, reports, articles, etc., that have already been created. Some secondary resources are:
Ensign College Library Databases - Library Data Bases
Search engine findings like Google Searches
YouTube videos relevant to your topics
After you have gathered all the data you can from secondary resources, you should then use primary resources to fill in any gaps. Primary resources require you to go out and gather the data, primary resources generally consist of:
Expert Interviews
Focus Groups
Surveys
Experimentation to find results or prove a hypothesis
This content is provided to you freely by Ensign College.
Access it online or download it at https://ensign.edtechbooks.org/projectbased_internships/the_work_plan.
