based on an article by Louise King
To create your workplan you first need to look at your entire organisation's plan, as well as any funding submissions or agreements related to your position. This helps you to know that what you are doing is consistent with the overall plan of your organisation.
It's a good idea to start off the year having a Planning Day with all workers and Management Committee members in your organisation. At this meeting you can all develop strategies to meet the aims and objectives of your organisation. At the same time you can do some educated guesswork about what you expect to be the outcomes of the strategies you implement.
Once your organisation has developed its plan for the year, you can then note who is responsible for each strategy, which will then inform your individual workplan. You should also look at your job description to ensure your plans are consistent with what you were employed to do!
What your workplan looks like is up to you, but it is useful to do it in columns, like the example below. This makes updating and following it much easier. You may also want to change the column headings to be consistent with the terms your organisation uses.
For each objective you can have as many strategies as you like, but each strategy must be matched with an expected outcome.
You might end up with a long list and you can decide to rate each strategy as a high (H), medium (M) or low priority (L).
When all this is complete the information can then be transferred onto a yearly planner (buy one if you can afford it) along with other dates and deadlines you know about. This can be kept somewhere easy to reach, or where you can see it.
When it comes to writing progress reports to your management it should be a simple process of recording the actual outcome against the expected outcome. The last column of the workplan can make this job easier. This column can be updated quarterly or monthly, depending on your organisation's policy.
If the expected outcome and actual outcome do not match you can write up some discussion about it and it can be taken into account in future planning considerations.
Workplans and reports should also make funding submissions a breeze because all the information that funding bodies require will be clearly documented and can be either attached to the submission or rewritten in a more concise form.
And, your workplan for next year will be much easier to do as you may have ongoing strategies that are part of your core business, which you can just copy over and then add any new strategies in.
Important things to remember when doing workplans:
- Involve your management in developing your workplan as much as possible so they have a clear understanding of the work you do and can support you and get involved.
- Be realistic about expected outcomes. Don't aim too high.
- Don't over-commit your time. Leave enough room for training and other things that you can't foresee in advance (eg. campaigns).
- Feel good about your workplan. See it as a framework for your direction.
- Don't worry if your expected outcomes are not reached. Either try not to expect so much of yourself or put it down to experience!
An example of a workplan format:
| Aims / objectives | Strategies | Indicators/ expected outcomes | Actual outcomes |
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