Despite the fact that young people have bold ideas for setting up initiatives in their community, our research shows that young people often do not know where to start in implementing their ideas. On this page you can find advice on how to plan the implementation of your initiative.
What is planning?
Planning is preparing a sequence of action steps to achieve a specific goal. A plan is like having a map for your initiative.
Why is planning important?
Planning helps you to:
- Clearly identify your long term vision, and short term goals.
- Uncover potential problems you might face along the way, and address how you could overcome these challenges.
- Monitor your success through tracking the progress of your goals.
- Ensure you meet the needs of your initiative in terms of time, money, personnel, or other resources.
The Planning Process
- Identify the objectives to be achieved. Firstly, set the overarching vision of your initiative; what you are ultimately trying to achieve. Then break this objective down into short term goals. Prioritise these goals in terms of which one needs to be achieved first.
- Identify key stakeholders
- Formulate the strategies and process you will carry out to meet each goal, consider each small step.
- Arrange or plan how to gain the means required, these should include funding, personnel, time, and information resources.
- Identify any potential problems and issues that could be met, and how a back up plan for how to adapt the plan to deal with them.
- Create the project schedule. Identify tasks and responsibilities then allocate them to each team member.
- Set a date for when each goal or task should be completed.
- Present the plan to stakeholders, and make necessarily changes they request.
- Implement your plan whilst continually monitoring if all the steps of your strategic plan to ensure they are being implemented in their proper sequence.