LDJ Project Plan Template · Facilitator Club

LDJ Project Plan Template

Aim

The workshop’s HMW-challenge. Possibility to add a higher aim with the HMW-challenge distilled from a previous workshop.

Background

The top voted problems from collection phase (two or more votes).

Limitations

High impact/high effort solutions. Optional to add but documents an awareness of other solutions that this project won’t include because it’s too much effort.

Goals and corresponding project goals

Success criteria (the goals) and corresponding high impact/low effort solutions (project goals) from commitment phase with

List of activities

The three steps to try each high impact/low effort solution.

Monitoring and evaluation

The activity board that defines what (high impact/low effort solutions), who and when.

Whoever is tasked with writing up the project plan suggests on when and how the entire project is evaluated, perhaps with another LDJ.

Some context...

Recently, I guided an executive team through two LDJs because they wanted to make progress in their strategic plan. While the workshop was an opportunity to force the team to commit to smaller tests, I anticipated that the complexity of the strategic plan will also require high effort solutions that they need to find a starting point for. To get the best of both, I decided to test to run the same LDJ-workshop twice.

The first workshop had a broader challenge focused on the team’s strategic plan and generated low effort tests that they committed to. The top voted solution in the project-box on the action board became the starting challenge for the second workshop.

The aim for the second workshop was to make progress on activities in the strategic plan that require high effort by breaking it down into a project plan the team could commit to. Two out of the team were tasked to write up the results of the workshop into a project plan template that I prepared for them. Using the framework of a project plan was beneficial in several ways:

The members are familiar with project management which made the workshop more relatable.
As a governmental department we must ensure our work is traceable. Thus, documentation is necessary where a project plan is a simple way to track work. The project plan also forces the team to formulate complete sentences to define their aims, problems, and goals.

Report writing for the sake of writing is a waste of effort however, one challenge I often see in meetings is that teams struggle to complete sentences and opt out with headlines and bullet points. Headlines and bullet points are only sketches before they are filled with paragraphs that structure arguments and provide context.

2 comments