home | strategy development | strategy skills | site index | access keys

Strategy Skills > Managing the Project

Structuring the work

> in practice

As part of the overall planning process, the work should be broken down into manageable work-streams. This will enable responsibility for discrete modules of work to be delegated to individual team members. Defining work-streams and responsibilities clearly is a crucial part of project management and will ensure that all team members are aware of what is expected of them.

Workstreams and team roles should be defined early in the Justification & Set-up phase and defined in more detail as the initial analysis progresses. Developing an issue tree will help to identify logical workstreams.

The initial analysis needs to be mapped onto the team structure and skills base to determine who will do what and by when. Using the map of issues to be addressed, the team should identify any critical dependencies and the key phases and strands of work. A tool such as a gantt chart for each of the key phases and each of the key strands of work to be completed in these phases should be prepared. These should set out in detail the tasks to be completed (i.e. interview stakeholders A and B) rather than just using high level statements. Team members should be involved in this stage in terms of identifying the tasks to be completed for their strands of work. These workstream-specific plans should feed into the over-arching project plan.

Team members need to think more widely than their workstream 'silos'. As well as being workstream focussed, individual team members may well be working on specific 'cross-cutting' issues or processes, generating a matrix structure of responsibilities as shown below.

The team leader may find it helpful to use a spreadsheet to keep track of which team members are assigned to which workstreams, what their key milestones are and when they are away from the office on leave or training.

^ top