A company or a business is created with the purpose of generating wealth and for this you have to plan various issues, such as forecasting sales, setting objectives or making accounting forecasts. These aspects are relevant but do not constitute a work plan.
We understand by a work plan the set of actions that are going to be carried out in a business or a department in order to achieve certain objectives, for example the objectives established in a budget. In this sense, a work plan is not made with numbers but with actions and tasks that are carried out by specific workers.
The work plan as a strategy that guides an activity
The concept of a work plan is applicable to a company, but also to a student, to a soccer team and, ultimately, to any personal or collective project. A plan is a guide for action and every guide must answer three fundamental questions: where are we, where do we want to go and how are we going to get there.
Guidelines for making an effective plan
The work plans are intended to achieve certain goals. Although each plan has to be adapted to the type of business or activity, it is possible to speak of general guidelines and some of them are the following:
- Specify the purpose of each work plan, since some plans should be oriented towards personal work, while others refer to teamwork. In this sense, in the purpose of a plan it is necessary to specify what is to be achieved and, above all, how it is to be achieved.
- When developing a plan, the goals to be achieved must be realistic, measurable and consistent. At the same time, a whole series of precise and objective indicators should be used (the indicators can be related to efficiency, the quality of a service or the economic question).
- A work plan must incorporate three types of resources: human, material and financial.
- In any work plan, evaluation systems must be introduced that allow the program execution to be assessed and its proper management reinforced.
- A work plan should not be understood as a list of activities that must be carried out in a systematic way.
- In any work plan, activities with objectives are established, but it is very important that both issues are accompanied by a schedule, that is, a graph that establishes when an activity will be carried out.
- In short, a work plan is the concrete answer to a series of questions: what needs to be done, who is going to do it, how and when.
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