Team Action Plan

1. Commit to meeting once a week at a time that is least disruptive and most productive to review all the projects that are in your plan.

2. This should be a session where people are open and honest about the real progress that has been made.

3. Keep to a sensible time-frame for this session; encourage short updates not debate. If there are issues that need real discussion this should be arranged outside this meeting. Use this session to identify resourcing and time-frame issues.

4. Use project planning tools. Having a detailed project plan with an agreed timeline is a vital part of any transformation process.

5. As part of the process, identify exactly what has been achieved, what has slipped and how the time can be recovered. There will be times when there are real difficulties over an action being carried out on time. Teams and organizations have different ways of coping with this. One approach is to accept it and almost collude with it happening on a regular basis. Another approach is much tougher and not to accept slippages. As ever there is a middle way: the most harmonious solution is to set a realistic time-frame in the first place.

6. This means mapping out the total journey and a really detailed action plan, effectively working through all the actions before they happen, questioning, challenging the assumptions, exploring the 'what ifs' and building in a contingency plan.

7. Tasks are allocated, regularly reviewed and absolutely no assumptions are made. Communication across all parts of the project is well maintained and the best-fit people are allocated to key roles.

8. In this way if things do go wrong there are mechanisms all along the way to ensure that the impact on the problem is minimized. Without this attention to detail, when things do go wrong the impact is much more serious.