I said it last week, and I’ll say it again. Nonprofit professionals wear many hats. When I was a program manager in a small nonprofit, my responsibilities spanned clinical supervision, program design, program evaluation, data management, grant writing, and grant reporting.
In this way, our work often overlaps with that of our colleagues on other teams and in other departments. It’s easy to start driving in someone else’s lane and start to feel like you know what goes on there. It’s also easy to think that a project belongs to one person or one department and that you’ll just draw upon others as resources when their expertise or effort is needed.
However, I strongly encourage you to have everyone who could possibly be impacted by or need to be involved in a project at the table during the planning. As we’ll see in the next post, the foundation of a strong project plan is an understanding of how tasks depend on one another. If different people are responsible for different tasks, they have to be involved in developing that plan because they know best what it takes to complete their piece of the puzzle and how it fits into the bigger picture.
What Happens When You Plan Alone?
In short, when you plan alone, your blind spots and assumptions can lead you to create unrealistic or inefficient plans, miss key steps, and alienate key team members.
I can offer an example from my own experience. A nonprofit had a large capacity building effort underway that was going to address several aspects of their operations – marketing/messaging, program design, program evaluation, data management, staffing and more. Unfortunately, rather than treating this effort as one large project with interrelated parts, the organization dove in and treated each as a separate effort. When they reached out to me to work on improving their evaluation strategies, we realized that the results of our work would necessitate changes in the marketing and database work they’d already done. They’d put the cart before the horse and thus had to re-do a significant amount of thinking and work. If they’d assembled the necessary team members in the beginning to explore the relationships between our work, they could have better sequenced the project tasks in a way that was cohesive, aligned, and efficient.
Who Should Be At the Table?
There are three types of people (called stakeholders) who should be involved in project planning:
- The Do-ers: At the very least, your project planning team should include representatives of all the disciplines or departments inside your organization who will be called upon to carry out any part of the project’s work. If possible, include any external supports (consultants, vendors, partners) who might be involved also.
- The Customers: Also, include anyone who will be receiving or using your final products or results.
- The Decision-Makers: Lastly, be sure to include the people who set the goals, timelines, and budgets as well as the people who set the guidelines for how your work must be done.
In our next post, we’ll talk about the first thing this team ought to do when they get together to plan a project.