How to Make a Plan

Planning allows you to organize your daily, weekly, or monthly tasks so that you won’t be overwhelmed by your hectic schedule.

It is important to first create a draft of your planning, before its creation. That way, you will be able to note down all the daily or monthly repetitive tasks you have to deal with. Once you have identified all the repetitive tasks, you will be ready to plan constructively. Free your mind up and just follow your plan so you can flawlessly track work that has been completed and outstanding tasks.

Using this vision for organization and perfect timing, choose the planning software that best suits your needs.

Choose a Planning Software

A planning management tool should have certain basic features. However, beware: not all the tools on the market provide these basics.

Your planning software should be able to carry out these types of general tasks:

A human resources management program that can: • Plan holidays and extra days off • Input sick leave or other leave • Display the daily, weekly, or monthly schedule of each employee

Manage Employee Leave and Absences

A plan can also be useful for work schedule management so that the use of resources is optimized. Indeed, during a project, planning will help you identify the resources you need to succeed. Tracking them prevents you from failing to achieve project goals because of an unanticipated lack of resources.

A work schedule management toolset helps to empower both the project manager and the team. The PM will be able to assign tasks, forecast deadlines, supervise the progress of the activities, and assess resource need and use, among other management tasks.

Here are the steps that are usually used to articulate a schedule:

Step 1: Set the objectives

Setting the objectives of a plan is important because:

• Differences between the intended objectives and the goals actually achieved can be analyzed
• The project’s progress can be easily seen and clearly communicated
• The resources needed for each task can be tracked
• It contributes to the good management of the time off for each member of the team

Step  2: Organize the plan

The best way to organize the plan is to identify all the tasks that need to be present in the document, separate them into several stages and subtasks, and assign responsibility for their completion.

Step 3: Set up timeframes and the deadlines for the project

For each task, plan four timeframes: an optimistic duration, the minimum duration, a pessimistic duration, and the ideal duration.

Prioritize also the degree of urgency (when must the task be completed?) as well as the importance (what happens if this task is not completed?).

Step 4: Allocate resources

Think ahead about all resources you need to lead your project well.

The plan enables you to share the vision of the work that has to be done with all the stakeholders. It allows everyone to understand what they need to do, make sure tasks have not been forgotten, and commit to carrying out the tasks within the expected time.

Step 5: Follow up on the plan

The schedule enables you to follow progress for each task and avoid any delay based on the fixed deadline. The closer the due date is, the more each member has to be in tune with their tasks, to prevent any last-minute mistakes.

On the same topic, discover how to make a schedule with free planning software.