When your team has decided on a basic course of action the next stage is to agree priorities, sequence and timing of steps. A good way to do this is to use perspective. This concept was popularized by Eddie Obeng in his book All Change: The project leader’s secret handbook (1994). Get your team to assume that the project has been completed and then to imagine the tasks that would have been undertaken to get there. It is helpful to display the team’s collective thinking visually, perhaps by writing the steps on post-it notes and sticking them on a whiteboard. In this way the information can be moved around to reflect developments in thinking. Using perspective: the process of imagining a project has been completed and the steps taken for getting there provides a simple illustration of this process by using an example of a project team set up to recommend more effective methods for obtaining feedback on service quality from clients. It illustrates the ‘imagined tasks’ involved in working through one strand of the project.
When you have completed the process illustrated in you can use it as a basis for allocating tasks to individuals. The post-it notes can be transferred to a chart with time along the horizontal axis and the names of team members on the vertical axis. It is helpful to have an individual owner, preferably a volunteer, for each task and to establish starting and finishing times. It is useful to insert time buffers if people believe that they have a very heavy workload. Time buffers are also valuable whenever more than one activity must be completed before the next activities can be started. It is a good idea to make sure that project team members have tasks and times recorded in their diaries.
Although project planning computer software packages can be helpful, those that are based on critical path analysis are not especially relevant to most projects undertaken in professional service firms. There are two reasons. As we have seen, professionals usually give part of their time only to project work. Teams are seldom 100 per cent dedicated. Because people’s time is limited it is more important to schedule that resource first and the tasks subsequently. Critical path analysis can help you to establish the best order for tasks to be done by identifying dependency constraints. The trouble with it is that it assumes dedication to the project by those undertaking the tasks. The second reason is that most professional service firm innovation and client projects, as far as their planning requirements are concerned, are too straightforward to justify its use.
You will want all of your team members to attend project team meetings held for generating ideas, reviewing progress and so on. It is generally regarded as good practice to fix dates for all meetings at the beginning. It is much easier to ensure a good attendance this way. Agreeing the dates with your project team colleagues at the start is part of the planning process.