Learning to Lead by Ron Williams

Author:Ron Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626346239
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Published: 2019-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

DEFENDING THE PLAN: THE ACTION-FORCING EVENT

Once you’ve developed a realistic plan that is driven by your organization’s true priorities, you face the challenge of getting people to stick to the schedule. Somehow you need to ensure that the sense of importance that guided the conversation when you were planning the project remains in place during the days, weeks, or months it takes for the project to come to fruition.

One powerful tool for defending the plan is the action-forcing event. I’ve used this concept to help hundreds of projects with multiple participants stay on track and on time. The action-forcing event is a bit like a deadline. The major difference is that an action-forcing event involves a deliverable outcome—a concrete, specifically defined work product—whose timing is carefully and thoughtfully planned based on an analysis of the prior step. By contrast, most deadlines are set arbitrarily and with minimal thought, which is why they tend to be missed.

Suppose one of the action-forcing events in your project plan is the completion of an employee survey to determine the three most important functions that a proposed new internal company website should carry out. You could establish a date for this event by just plucking it from the air—but that’s a recipe for disappointment and delay. Instead, you need to work with the people who will be performing the required tasks to define precisely what needs to happen and how long each step will realistically take. In this case, the necessary steps might include the following:

•Step 1: Drafting the survey questions—3 working days

•Step 2: Having the survey content and format vetted and revised by experts in the HR department—3 days

•Step 3: Making a list of employees and departments to be included in the survey and having the list okayed by the project director—3 days (simultaneous with Step 2)

•Step 4: Disseminating the survey to employees via email—1 day

•Step 5: Allowing time for employees to respond to survey; gathering and tabulating results—5 days

•Step 6: Analyzing the results and writing a two-page report summarizing the key findings—3 days

The action-forcing event can only occur after all six steps have been completed. Since the time required for the steps totals fifteen working days, you can safely schedule the action-forcing event for three weeks from the starting date (assuming a standard work week of five days).

The number and kind of action-forcing events you should build into your project plan depend on the nature and complexity of the project. A huge project involving contributions from dozens or scores of people over six months or more may require ten to twenty action-forcing events, each carefully defined and assigned a particular target date. A smaller, simpler project may require only two or three action-forcing events. In both cases, the action-forcing events serve as milestones, driving the work schedule and triggering alarm bells whenever one or more events are missed.

As you can see, action-forcing events not only help to alert you when the project plan may be slipping, but they also focus the attention of

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