Implementation Plan

Implementation Plan

The difference between advice that gets implemented and advice that does not is almost never the quality of the advice.

When to use

• A recommendations row reaches accepted.
• A client asks what doing this would actually involve.

Steps

1. Name who does it. Not a department — a role, inside the client, with the authority to act. A plan whose owner is "the business" has no owner.
2. Find the first step that fits in a week. A plan whose first step takes a quarter will not be started.
3. Sequence by dependency, not by importance. The most important step is frequently the third one, and starting there is how implementations stall.
4. Name what has to stop. Every plan competes with what the client is already doing, and the one that does not say what to stop is the one that gets absorbed and disappears.
5. State the decision points — where the plan would be reconsidered, and on what evidence.
6. Record it against the recommendation, so outcome can eventually be filled in with what actually happened.

Output

A sequenced plan with a named owner per step, a first step that fits in a week, what has to stop, and the points at which it would be reconsidered. Anything committing this firm to delivery goes on commitments and past the operator.