Developing our 30-Day Plan
Developing our 30-Day Plan
If the Goal is the equivalent of the 30-day team’s mission and purpose, the Work Plan is the equivalent of its strategy. The 30-Day Plan is the Team’s best guess of the actions that need to be taken between day 1 and day 30 to achieve the Goal. As the Team moves into action and tries new things, the 30-Day Plan may evolve and expand. Without the 30-Day Plan and the disciplined implementation that follows it, the Goal is merely wishful thinking.
Process time: 90 min
Step 1 - Generating ideas (15 min)
Start by brainstorming on a flip chart using post-it notes.
- Hand each team member a packet of post-it notes and a pen. Ask them to think about actions and/or ideas that can help them achieve the goal. Ask them to write one action/idea on each post-it note.
- After a brief period of idea generation, ask the group to look at the wall of Post-it notes to see if this inspires additional ideas. You can do another round of individual “ideation” with post-it notes. If the ideas are all related to doing things a little better, challenge them to come up with completely new ideas.
Step 2 - Clustering ideas (10 min)
Ask the group to start clustering the post-its that go together. Ask the group to label each cluster with a heading that best describes the cluster.
The post-its on the slides are just examples. The headings will become work streams (step 3) in the plan, and most post-its will become action steps (step 4) in that work stream.
Step 3 - Creating planning swim lanes (20 min)
- Before the session, you need to create a blank timeline with several “swim lanes” on flip charts (see the diagram below). Each swim lane will be populated with post-its from one cluster of ideas. Once these post-its are turned into actions, we will refer to each swim lane as a “work stream” (for tips on how to do this, watch the video below: Creating Planning Swim Lanes.
- Ask team members to split into two or three subgroups, each focused on one or two clusters of ideas.
- Each subgroup discusses the post-it notes in each of their clusters, consolidates some of them if needed, and turns each into an action step. Then, they move them to the corresponding swim lane, placing them in the right time frame. They can also begin assigning team member names to each one (one name per post-it note).
- The whole team does a “stress-test” to the emerging plan, represented by these post-it notes in the swim lanes. “Does completing these action items give us high confidence that the Goal will be achieved”? If the answer is no, challenge the team to identify missing work streams and identify action steps within this.
Step 4 - Reviewing and refining the plan (15 min)
Sub-groups add names and dates to each post-it note in the swim lanes.
The whole team reviews all the swim lanes’ timelines to see if there are any gaps, or too many action steps in one timeframe, or if actions across swim lanes need to be better aligned. They discuss and make adjustments as needed.
Ask for a volunteer to transcribe the timeline into a work-planning template. This will be the first version of the Team’s work plan.
Step 5 - Feedback and close-out (30 min)
Feedback to the mentor
Ask the Team Leader to welcome the Project Sponsor and to provide a brief overview of the goal and 2-3 highlights of the plan, including:
- What is particularly exciting to the Team about the plan (e.g. innovative ideas they want to test)?
- What is worrisome?
- What support do they need from the mentor and other leaders in the organisation?
- What advice would they like from the Mentor?
Invite other Team members to pitch in if time permits. Invite Mentor to comment and respond. If they begin criticise the Team, try to steer them that gently.
Onwards
Outline the way forward:
- Daily or weekly team meetings.
- Weekly check-in between the Team Leader and Project Sponsor
- The Refresh Workshop (Day 15) is when the Project Sponsor will do a deep-dive review with the Team.
- Scale-Up Workshop (day 30) to celebrate and chart the way forward.
Workshop feedback
Ask Team members to complete the short workshop feedback survey to help you identify improvements for the next workshop.
Appreciation
Ask each Team member to think of others on the team who have made a unique contributions during the workshop that merit acknowledgement and appreciation.
- It could be something they said to make it easy for someone else on the team to speak up.
- Or a brilliant idea they came up with.
- Or encouraging the team to think big.
- Or saying something that others were thinking, but did not dare to say.
Closing comments
Ask the Project Sponsor to make a closing comment, and you can also ask each Team member to say one word that expresses how they feel at the end of the Workshop.
Photo
Take a group photo, with and without the Project Sponsor. Also, take photos of the 30-Day Plan and Goal (if on a flip chart) in case these get lost.
Action planning template explained
Creating planning swim lanes
Work plan exercise
The work plan grows from ideas into action steps. In the lift-off work plan, each team member will be responsible for some of these action steps. To help you understand the difference between ideas and action steps, identify which category the following statements correspond to.
Please note that before the work plan is completed, each action step post-it will have a team member’s name on it.
Drag and drop the grey boxes onto the correct category in the coloured boxes.
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