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?

And I do that, first of all, by doing secondary research. And in this secondary research, which is online or in databases, etc., in the secondary research, I'm looking for trends and issues that I'm going to use. So, let's work back. So we've worked backward. This is the answer of where we're trying to go, but we're first going to do the secondary research, which will lead us to expert interviews, which may lead us to a focus group, which then we will create a survey instrument and come up with a list of the subjects who are going to take the survey. From that, we will create an output of the survey that we have confidence in how our target audience is going to act, which will lead us to how do our companies, how do our customers make a decision? We got this list by starting with the answer and working our way backward.

Now we can take each one of these individual elements, these tasks, these activities, and we can place them in an action register, assign them to individuals within the team, and develop a Gantt chart with a visual representation of how we will get our project done on time. And that's it. That's how you make a work plan.