Step 6 - Plan Your Project

Overview

In this stage you plan out what you are going to do, how you are going to do it and who has responsibility for it.

Why is this step important?

Having put the time and effort into identifying the key issues, providing data to justify the need and planning a structure for your project, you want to ensure that the activities you choose are well thought out and implemented. This is where action and delivery plans come in. By drawing these up you ensure that each step of action is mapped out and responsibility assigned.

What are the right things to do?

At this point you are actually going to start deciding what actions to take as part of the project. Hopefully with the all background work put in so far this will be fairly straightforward. Your research may have already identified gaps in provision, you should also have some clues from the brainstorming session, and your objectives hopefully have focussed attention on specific areas.

However there are still a myriad of ideas and activities you could choose to undertake, and considering the variety of destinations there are no real right answers. Once you have a list of potential activities, talk to your local authority tourism officer or regional tourist board. They will be able to advise on what has worked elsewhere, major pitfalls in your plans, or maybe encourage you to work with others who are thinking along the same lines.

Go back to your stakeholders and get their views, this may help to increase local support for what you are doing, recruit more volunteers with useful skills to some of your activities and give useful feedback on your ideas and plans.

Take on board all the feedback and advice, look over your research and if it looks like a worthwhile activity for your destination then go for it!

The process

Action Planning
Once you know what you want to achieve and have a broad idea of what you are going to do, you need to write a plan. Your action plan should describe the activities you will carry out, when and who will be responsible.

See an example of an action plan here (.doc 31kb) >>

No group should try and undertake every possible action, so you need to discuss and prioritise them based on which is needed most. An action-planning workshop with your group is great way of doing this and ensuring everyone’s views are taken into account.

Once you have your prioritised actions, take as many as you feel can be achieved and assign overall responsibility for delivering those actions. How this works will depend on your group’s structure, you may have sub-groups looking at each particular element, or perhaps together, you look at all of them. Either way make sure each action has a name beside it. Finally using your objectives as a guide, place a deadline against each action for its completion.

Develop delivery plan
The delivery plan gives the detail to your action plan, this is your document to keep track of your own progress. The delivery plan takes each of the actions you have decided to carry out and breaks them down into the detail that shows how they will be achieved, in chronological order.

It takes a broad action, like improving signage, and defines each step needed to achieve it. The plan says who will be responsible for each action, how much it is likely to cost, when it will be done by and how you will know it has been done (an indicator).

See an example of a delivery plan here (.doc 110kb) >>

Delivery plans provide an excellent reality check on any action. It’s very easy to say we’ll do X, but you may find X requires far more input than you as a group can give once you break it down into its component steps. Finally a delivery plan is also a great way of assigning and agreeing responsibility within the project, in so far as you can give people distinct tasks and specific deadlines. This makes the process straightforward and manageable.

Planning for the future
The last part of planning your project is to consider the sustainability of each action. Very few activities will be one off , and you need to plan what will happen once you have set up and delivered the initial phase. If for example you are creating a website, who will maintain and update it going forward, who will cover the ongoing costs, and how will you continue to publicise the site so people are aware of it?

Look critically and decide how each could be taken forward, what resources are needed to do so, and who will be responsible.

With all your plans firmly in place you should have a very clear idea of what to do and how to do it. The next step is then determining the actual cost of the activities and deciding whether to seek funding.

Where can I get more information?

For a brief overview of what an action plan is see:

www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newHTE_04.htm >>

For a description on how to facilitate an action planning workshop with a group, see:

www.rkrk.net.au/index.php/How_to_facilitate_an_action_planning_workshop >>

Downloads & More Help

If you require advice or guidance on any stage, why not consider working with Hidden Britain?

Go to Contact Form >>

Move onto the next stage

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