This document summarizes the objectives and content covered in a graduate boot camp session on action planning and project management. The session covered: understanding project management; identifying individual actions to achieve goals; ordering actions effectively; estimating time; understanding critical paths; and ways for businesses to grow. Attendees learned tools for goal setting, mapping dependencies between tasks, creating Gantt charts, roadmapping, and monitoring progress. They practiced applying these concepts by decomposing goals into tasks, ordering tasks to make a cup of tea, and creating development timelines for their own businesses in the short and long term.

1. Graduate Champions
Boot camp – session 4

2. ACTION PLANNING

3. Todays objectives
• Gaining an understanding of what project management is
• Gaining the ability to identify individual actions to achieving your goal
• Understanding how to place these individual actions in an effective order
• Understanding how to estimate time for actions
• Knowledge of what a critical path is
• Identifying ways in which your business can grow.

4. What do you want from your business?
Where
are you
now?
Where
do you
want to
go?
How are
you
going to
get
there

5. Where do you want to go?
• By the end of the first year?
• Within the next 24 months
• In 5 years time?

6. Wildly Important Goal
• What’s your one wildly important goal?

7. How will you get there?
What are the individual steps to getting
to your goals?

8. How do you make a cup of tea?
• What are the individual tasks to making a cup of tea?
−E.g.
−get cup out of cupboard
−Get tea bag
Try not to think about an order – just the simple tasks

9. Get milk
Fill kettle
Get mug
Turn kettle on
Get tea bag
Get spoon
Wait for kettle to
boil
Pour milk in
Put sugar in
Get sugar
Pour water in
Leave to brew Take tea bag
out
Put tea bag in
Leave to cool
How do you make a cup of tea?

10. Dependencies
• Known as the relationship between tasks in a project
• All of the tasks in a project are sequenced according to their dependencies for each other
• Dependencies are critical for:
− Sequencing work packages
− Calculating a critical path
− Identifying resources and scheduling issues and making supportive decisions
− Identifying opportunities for fast tracking or fast failing

11. Categories of dependencies
• Logical planning dependencies
− there are dependencies which are logic driven. i.e. you cannot paint a wall before the wall is even built
• Resource based planning dependencies
− These are dependencies where the task could be completed quicker if you had more resources
• Preference planning dependencies
− These are tasks that could be scheduled in a different order but the project manager chooses to schedule
them in this way.

12. How to make a cup of tea
• Now try and put them in a specific order.
• Consider which tasks link to others and how
they link

13. Get milk
Fill kettle
Get mug
Turn kettle on
Get tea bag Get spoon
Wait for kettle to
boil
Pour milk in
Put sugar inGet sugar
Pour water in
Leave to brew Take tea bag
out
Put tea bag in
Leave to cool
How do you make a cup of tea?
Enjoy

14. Critical path
• The sequence of activities that any project must follow
• Where a delay in one task will lead to a delay in the whole project
• The critical path is usually the path through which the project will take the longest dependent time.

15. Critical path

16. Critical path
•Can you find the critical path to making
a cup of tea?

17. Get milk
Fill kettle
Get mug
Turn kettle on
Get tea bag Get spoon
Wait for kettle to
boil
Pour milk in
Put sugar inGet sugar
Pour water in
Leave to brew Take tea bag
out
Put tea bag in
Leave to cool
How do you make a cup of tea?
Enjoy
Critical Path

18. Now lets look at yours
• What are the tasks you will have to do to achieve your end of year 1
goal?
− Identify just the tasks – nothing else at this stage
Tip
If its too much – divide the goal into chapters similar to what the
business would need to do:
− Production
− Marketing
− Sales
− Finance
Then identify the individual tasks within each chapter

19. Now yours
• Marketing
− Task?
− Task?
− Task?
• Finance
• Task?
• Task?
• Task?
• Product
development
• Task?
• Task?
• Task?
• Sales
• Task?
• Task?
• Task?
• Admin
• Task?
• Task?
• Task?

20. Mind mapping for planning

21. Dependencies
• Can you now try to place them in an order in the
same way we did the “cup of tea” exercise?

22. Prosper Planning
• What’s your one wildly important goal?
• What are the individual objectives to achieving this?
− Perhaps per “department”
• What are the actions to achieving each objective?
• What are the measures of success?

24. Gantt Charts – what are you going to do and when

25. Road Mapping

27. Longer term planning
• How are you going to grow?
• Typically 4 areas available
− Geographic expansion
− New products / features
− New technology
− New customer segments

28. What does your road map look like?
• Can you create a development timeline for your business
in year 1?
• What are your key achievement milestones?

29. Longer term planning

30. What does your long term strategy look like?
• Can you create a development timeline for your business
beyond year 1?
• What are your achievement milestones?
− Think about
−New tech
−New features
−New markets
−New locations

31. Monitoring progress

32. Actions
Tomorrow This week This month This year
Keep doing
Do more of
Do less of

33. Any questions?