How to Create an Action Plan for Your Business

In business terminology, an action plan refers to a project management technique that outlines attainable ways to achieve your goals. When incorporated into a strategic planning process, action plans allow you to tangibly pursue initiatives, thus turning your promising ideas into real-world endeavors.

Team members can use action plans as blueprints for streamlined strategic planning. Consider, for instance, a marketing team that needs to reimagine its outreach campaigns with an end goal of getting twenty percent more campaign engagement. To accomplish this, the marketing director can propose a step-by-step corrective action plan—one that will establish new workflows and will set milestones for success. Individual team members can then create their own personalized action plans related to their specific tasks within the broader marketing action plan. If successfully executed, the new action plan will align all stakeholders toward a specific goal and improve the marketing team’s chances of success.

Working professionals need action plans to turn brainstorms into tangible campaigns. These plans help teams move beyond the idea stage and into the production stage. Action plans apply to all corners of a business. Product departments, sales departments, marketing departments, human resources departments, IT departments, and executive management teams all benefit from action plans because they provide timelines and methodologies to advance those departments’ goals.

Even the simplest of action plans can provide a roadmap for a project and help stakeholders get on board. Think of a film crew scheduling a one-day shoot. The crew’s action plan might include a shot list and an hour-by-hour schedule that breaks down the day on set. The plan will include specific steps required to produce the desired footage, and it will assign duties to the entire crew, all in the name of achieving the project’s stated goals. Each step is time-bound, offering actionable steps to capture each shot.

You can develop an effective action plan to help achieve your goals in a careful step-by-step fashion. Your action plan can also help you track progress by laying out a sequential series of milestones. With each milestone you pass, you increase morale and boost your chances of actually achieving your goal. Use these steps in your own project planning initiative:

1. 1. Set a SMART goal. Seasoned business managers often categorize goals using the acronym SMART, which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. As you brainstorm your action plan, choose goals that fit all these categories. Setting a goal to “be successful” is neither specific nor measurable. By contrast, a goal to “bring two branch locations out of the financial red zone within two years” is far more specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.
2. 2. Identify tasks. Set the tasks and milestones you and your team want to reach along the way to the main objective. Assign these tasks, or action items, to specific team members. Or, if you’re drafting an individual action plan, break down your tasks into smaller steps, each with its own due date.
3. 3. Allocate resources. Each action step on your to-do list will likely require its own set of resources needed to complete it. Resources could mean funds, personnel, vehicles, office space, tools, travel budgets, or simply time.
4. 4. Prioritize tasks. The importance of specific tasks may not always follow a linear timeline. Perhaps the most important work in your action plan will come near the middle of the project. In this case, you must ensure there will be ample resources when that stage of the project arises. If one team’s project gets more funding than another’s project, this does not necessarily reflect management choosing to favor one team over another. It simply means that, in the course of action planning, management realized that a particular task required a higher level of prioritization.
5. 5. Set deadlines and milestones. Deadlines keep teams on task throughout the course of a project. Use visual tools like a timeline or a Gantt chart (a chart that depicts project schedules as rectangular bars) to help the team with time management. You’ll also need to set goals and performance metrics by which you can evaluate your team’s progress. Such goals include completing a percentage of the project in a certain timeframe, or managing to complete tasks without exceeding a certain budget allocation.
6. 6. Monitor and revise. Your action plan will require constant maintenance until your project is completed. Plan to continually refine the plan, adjust deadlines, and reprioritize tasks as the work unfolds. Monitor team progress and unforeseen dependencies. You may be forced to reconsider core tenets of your original action plan. Such readjustments may feel frustrating or tedious, but your reward will come in the form of a successfully completed project.

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