Operations 101: How to create a great workplan
Or, how to create a structured artifact to manage collaborative projects
Driving progress on collaborative projects is hard.
We’ve all experienced a poorly managed project.
The type of project where you’re holding a lot of meetings, but no decisions are being made. Everyone’s working hard but nothing seems to be progressing. People don’t agree on sequence of things to be done, or the specific steps they need to take to reach the desired outcome.
We’ve all experienced smooth projects.
The type of project where everyone seems to know what they’re doing. Tasks are completed ahead of schedule. If meetings are held, they’re tight and efficient. Everyone’s aligned on a shared goal.
So what’s the difference between the two? Why are some projects run so effectively, and some run so poorly?
The answer is workplanning.
Workplanning is the essential skill that great project managers have, whether they’re a PM, engineering lead, consultant, CEO, or generalist. And it’s something that anyone can learn.
In this post, i’ll define workplanning, share frameworks & templates that you can use to create great workplans, and dig into why it’s such an important skill.
Let’s dive in!
What is workplanning?
Workplanning is the art of taking a desired outcome and turning it into a series of concrete actions with owners and timelines. In my experience, it’s the essential skill that great project managers have.
Workplaning involves a few key steps:
Define the objective of the work
Create a list of tasks by planning backwards from the objective
Add owners, timelines, and engagements
Share the workplan with the working group and incorporate feedback
Kick off the project and hold people accountable
Importantly, great workplanning does not involve long, drawn-out meetings or extended conversations about “alignment”.
The output of workplanning is a workplan: an artifact that can be shared & understood asynchronously. The skill of workplanning is taking something fuzzy and opaque (a desired outcome) and converting it into something tractable (a series of tasks).
Doing this well frees other people from pointless meetings or conversations; it eliminates confusion, rather than creating it. If you’re doing it right, workplans should provide structure and clarity to enable great work - rather than creating work themselves.
How to create a great workplan
Step 1: Define the objective of the work
Before you can build a workplan, you need to understand what you’re hoping to do and who you’re hoping to do it with. Warning: this is the stage that can result in long meetings.
Generally, projects start with a broad goal: increase sales, cut costs, change perception, increase retention. There are countless ways to achieve these objectives - so the first step is to identify the best places to start.
Let’s say you want to increase sales. First, you’d want to brainstorm a set of tactics you could use to achieve that goal, such as:
Launch more Google search ads
Launch a marketing campaign focused on a specific vertical
Hire more sellers
Have your CEO reach out to more prospects
Next, you need to prioritize these potential tactics. This is the hardest part of this process, and is the step when you’ll need to do real strategy work (e.g., pulling data, sizing the potential impact of each actions, estimating ROI, etc.). If you’re junior, other people will probably step in to help here.
At the end of this process, you should have a concrete tactic that you want to try. Now, you need to turn that tactic into a concrete objective.
Let’s say the team agreed that it’s time to hire more sellers. To turn that into an objective, you need to make it more measurable, specific, and time-bound (the SMART goal framework helps here). ”Hire more sellers” becomes “Hire 1 mid-market seller and 1 enterprise seller before the end of the quarter”.
Once you have an objective, you’re ready to break it down into tasks.
Step 2: Create a list of tasks by planning backwards from the objective
Once you know what you want to do, it’s time to think about how to do it.
The easiest way to do this is to start at the end. Let’s say you hired two sellers - what happened before you hired them? Well…
They would have signed an offer
They would have been given an offer
They’d have gone through an interview process
They’d have applied for the job
They’d have seen the job posting
Now, reverse the steps and turn them into specific actions your org would need to take:
Write a job posting for each role
Post the job for each role
Create a list of qualified candidates for outreach
Reach out to qualified candidates
Schedule first-round interviews
Conduct first-round interviews
Decide on which candidates to pass through to second round
Conduct second-round interviews
Review interview results with the interview committee & decide on which candidates to give an offer to
Extend the offers
Follow up to “sell” candidates after the offers are extended
Just like that, you have a list of tasks for a workplan!
If you’re super familiar with the project you’re leading, you can take this list and move onto the next step.
If you’re not, you’ll want to run this list by someone who’s familiar with the subject at hand (or your manager). They’ll be able to give feedback on which steps are necessary and which can be dropped (or skipped). But this first attempt at defining the work to be done is incredibly useful - and people will appreciate the proactive step you’ve taken.
Step 3: Add owners, timelines, and engagements to the tasks
Now that you have a good list of tasks to be done, it’s time to assign owners, timelines & engagements to the list.
An easy way to do this is with a simple table.
You can use any software to create this table: excel, Notion, Airtable, a task management tool, or even a doc. Regardless of what tool you use, the structure is immensely clarifying.
Step 4: Share the workplan with working group and incorporate feedback
By creating this workplan, you’ve also created the working group! Everyone listed in the workplan that needs to execute a task is a part of the working group.
Now that you have the group, you can send them the plan! I like to do this asynchronously, and only a meeting if there’s dissent about the path forward.
The message can be simple, something like: “Hi everyone. I know we agreed that we wanted to hire more sellers. Here’s how I’m thinking we can go about it, and the proposed timeline. Does this work for everyone? Feel free to make edits or suggest things we can move up”
Just like that - you’ve structured the project! Your collaborators will add steps, debate timelines, or propose changes, but at this point, those are all simple edits.
Step 5: Kick off the project and hold people accountable
Now, you’re ready to begin!
Depending on the project, you could hold a formal kickoff, or you could just send a message to the working group.
As the project goes on, it’s helpful to track the status of each task (mark each as “done”) and intervene if anything is off track. Of course, it’s fine to re-adjust midway through if the timelines weren’t reasonable, but your job is to keep things on track as much as possible.
Some ways to do that:
Proactively remind people of the work they’re expected to complete
Provide resources (people, past work, etc.) to help complete tasks
Re-scope tasks so that they aren’t so difficul
Jump in yourself and help out
It can also be helpful to send updates on a regular cadence (once a week is good) just to keep it top of mind for everyone.
Why is workplanning so important?
First, workplans allow teams to be aligned on tasks without having a lot of meetings. This is incredibly important.
I’ve spent time in a few slow, unproductive orgs. The #1 difference I notice between these orgs & hyper-productive orgs is the amount of meetings that are held.
In unproductive orgs, meetings are endless. Every project update is a meeting. There are meetings to plan for update meetings. Every change in the direction of a project results in a new meeting. The list goes on & on.
This creates a culture where people are more concerned about have a “good meeting” than actually getting anything done. This is the death knell of productivity.
Workplans are a way to short-circuit this sort of culture. By creating a clear, succinct artifact that can be reviewed asynchronously, you can liberate people from meetings - allowing them to use that time to get work done. The impact of great workplanning can be transformative.
Second, workplans are a forcing function to talk about specific things that need to get done, rather than ideas or concepts.
When people are planning work, they often get lost in conversations that have nothing to do with the work itself.
In the sales hiring example, they start debating items in the job description before it’s been written, or talking about what territory that seller will get, or discussing how they’ll onboard the new sellers onto the team. This type of future-looking, hypothetical talk is massive time sink at most organizations.
Of course, all these topics are valid things to discuss - but they’re all pointless until the work has actually been done. You can’t edit a JD until it’s been written; you can’t onboard a seller until they’ve been hired. By the time the work is complete, the situation will have changed, so there’s very little point to discussing it in advance.
The workplanning process is centered around tasks, so it forces people to focus on tasks.
Finally, workplanning can be a massive career accelerator because it gives you a lot of leverage.
If you get good at workplanning, it allows you to manage complex processes without much active work. You create a workplan, share it with a group, and the group can execute it without too much intervention.
It’s also an incredibly useful skill for managers. When you create a workplan for your reports, you can turn work into a simple checklist for them to execute. You’ve essentially handed off the management of a project to a document that they can use independently.
It gets even better when you train your reports to create workplans themselves. Now, they’re coming to you with a proposed structure for a project. After providing a bit of input to refine the steps, you’ll what they’re working on doing and how they’re going about that work without having to manage them at all!
Most importantly, by learning the workplanning process, they’re becoming way more valuable to the organization as a whole.
Over time, workplanning gives you way to manage your team and cross-functional projects super efficiently - amplifying the amount of work you can accomplish.
Closing thoughts
Workplanning is a core skill that’s taught in consulting. The prevalence of this skill is one of the biggest reasons that consulting firms are so efficient.
It’s one of the most generalizable skills you learn, and it’s useful in nearly every discipline. Whether you’re managing yourself or a 100 person team, it will help you become more productive and more efficient.
Hopefully this was a helpful primer on the topic. There’s a lot of important parts I glossed over (especially the process of turning tactics into objectives), which I plan to cover at a later date.
In the meantime, let me know if you have any questions about workplanning or could use any specific resources! (templates, tool suggestions, etc.)
Thanks to Statsig for employing me (note - this is a test for Statsig SEO).