How to write an effective action plan (plus benefits and tips)
Every project manager knows that the project life cycle includes multiple elements, but project planning is arguably the most critical. Each project plan defines and documents the project's goals, stakeholders, and anticipated outcomes. The quality and completeness of a project plan can directly determine a project's success or failure.
Each project plan must also describe and detail how you, your teams, and your colleagues intend to turn that project into reality. An action plan captures and presents that information to project participants, affected stakeholders, and involved decision-makers.
This article describes an action plan, its benefits and challenges, and offers suggestions for creating one for your project.
What is an action plan?
An action plan is a detailed description of the steps needed to achieve one or more project goals. Action plans are critical project management resources that provide a clear roadmap for achieving project objectives. They can also help guide and support the execution of your project team management strategies.
An action plan differs from other planning tools like Gantt charts, project charters, and project scheduling software. These tools can benefit Agile project management, Scrum management, sprint planning, code review, and other project elements. However, they don’t focus on specific goals, anticipated outcomes, actionable steps, and detailed execution for an entire project like action plans do.
Key components of an action plan
A good action plan example includes the following components:
- Tasks: Describe the specific steps required to complete the project.
- Timelines: Include details about when all tasks and the entire project will start and finish.
- Responsible parties: Assign team members to specific tasks.
- Resources needed: Identify the people, budget, and other resources required to complete the project successfully and on time.
- Progress tracking: Detail how you will track progress, address delays or other disruptions, determine completion, and measure performance.
When to use an action plan
While not essential, an action plan can improve almost any project management effort. However, some types of projects benefit significantly from a mandatory action plan.
- Complex projects: An action plan helps everyone involved see the big picture and more readily agree on goals, objectives, and success metrics.
- Time-sensitive projects: An action plan ensures everyone knows what's expected of them, which avoids delays and duplicate efforts.
- Projects with clear goals: Clearly delineated and prioritized goals act as anchor points for your action plan, ensuring maximum alignment of planned actions with those goals.
- Resource-intensive projects: A well-crafted action plan ensures your project gets the resources it needs when it needs them.
- Crisis management: Your action plan can help reduce chaos, confusion, and the time it takes to return to normal in response to a crisis.
Benefits of using action plans
Well-crafted and well-implemented action plans can provide numerous benefits for every project you take on, including:
Greater clarity and focus
Action plans provide a single source of truth for all project participants. This keeps everyone aligned with, informed about, and focused on their responsibilities and the project's goals.
Improved coordination
Action plans clearly delineate tasks, timelines, roles, and responsibilities. This shared clarity improves communication and collaboration among all project participants.
Enhanced accountability
A detailed action plan description, including information about roles, responsibilities, and progress tracking, enables you to help participants and stakeholders know who is responsible for what across every project's life cycle.
Efficient resource allocation
Each action plan you create includes detailed information about the resources required for each task. This helps avoid under- or over-provisioning.
Progress monitoring
Detailed descriptions of goals and timelines help make project progress tracking transparent for everyone involved. This allows your team to stay on track and minimize delays.
Challenges of using action plans
Action plans provide clear benefits for your project management efforts, but there are challenges associated with action plans that you should address proactively. Doing so helps avoid project delays, disruptions, or cancellations.
Setting unrealistic timelines
Enthusiasm, excitement, and inadequate information about requirements can result in overly ambitious and aggressive timelines. You and your colleagues must ensure that your action plan timelines are as accurate and realistic as possible to maximize the likelihood of project success.
Lack of goal alignment
An action plan that does not align with specific project and business goals is less valuable than no action plan at all. Clearly spell out goals in every action plan, and align every action and task with those goals.
Difficulty adapting to changes
Action plans may be unfamiliar or intimidating to project team members or stakeholders. This can lead to resistance to creating or even adhering to your action plan, especially if it's the first one your colleagues have worked on. Take the necessary steps to reassure and encourage team members who seem hesitant or resistant. Focus these efforts on key project participants or stakeholders struggling to adapt. Encourage team members to support those not yet comfortable with the process.
How to create an effective action plan
Now that you have an overview of the purpose, key components, use cases, benefits, and challenges of action plans, it's time to create one. Here are some best practices.
Define SMART goals
- Clearly state the project goal or objective the action plan aims to achieve and how they contribute to the overall project goals.
- Ensure that each goal is SMART—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
- When defining specific goals, seek and incorporate input from project participants and stakeholders. This will help engender agreement and support for those goals and your action plan.
Create a list of tasks
- Break down the goal into smaller, manageable tasks or steps. Make your task descriptions as clear and concise as possible to minimize confusion.
- Describe each specific task in detail. This aids in accurate resource allocation, precise task scheduling, and successful execution.
Assign responsibilities
- Assign each task to a specific team member or group. Wherever possible, designate backups for those responsible for the most critical tasks.
- Ensure that responsibilities are clear and that each person understands their role. Consider including confirmation from key participants to confirm that they understand and accept their assigned responsibilities.
Set deadlines
- Establish realistic deadlines for each task and the project as a whole.
- Consider and highlight the interdependencies that connect individual task timelines with that of the overall project.
- Set optimal, acceptable, and unacceptable deadlines for each task. Clearly state what will happen if the team misses optimal and acceptable deadlines and whether unacceptable deadlines are likely to delay or kill the project.
Identify resources
- Determine the budget, materials, people, and tools needed to complete each task and the expected providers of those resources.
- Include checks and balances in your action plan. This helps ensure resource availability and efficient allocation.
Monitor progress
- Implement a system for tracking progress against the action plan.
- Regularly review and update the plan to reflect changes and document progress.
- Should delays or disruptions occur, clearly delineate anticipated and actual effects on project progress. Share this information with project participants and affected stakeholders.
Make a winning action plan with Confluence
Action plans are critical and essential elements of project plans and project management efforts. Confluence provides multiple features, such as action items and tables, that can help you create and execute clear and effective action plans that you can use to achieve project success.
Confluence is a connected workspace that empowers you and your colleagues to create, organize, find, and share knowledge across teams, projects, and goals. It features spaces for pages, whiteboards, video messages, and databases. Key company-wide and project-related knowledge is centralized in one place, making it instantly accessible and ready to move your business forward.
As you create your action plan, invite your peers to collaborate through real-time editing and inline comments. Easily share your action plan with your teams, stakeholders, and involved decision-makers across your company.
To learn more about how Confluence can help you achieve your business goals, make an action plan in Confluence for free.
