How to Create a Strategic Project Plan for Business | Plan Like an Entrepreneur
Last week i showed you how i create the plan for a new month to make sure that i'm moving my goals forward but i kind of just breezed by two key elements that go into making that plan so first is my goal setting process and the second one is my project planning process i'm actually going to go in depth in my project planning process and actually walk you through a project plan in this video but first let me catch you up on how i actually set my goals and turn them into objectives sound good let's get started hello my charmed ones and welcome back to my channel for another video and if this is your first time with me i would like to say welcome my name is alexis but i'm also known as miss trenchcoat all across the internet i'm an online entrepreneur who designs digital productivity tools to help overwhelmed women manage their time energy and expectations so they can get all their big thoughts plans dreams and ideas out of their head and onto paper so they can get down to business creating their dream life and today's video is going to be about a big part of that the objective setting and project planning so that you can actually move forward on your goals break down your big goals into little manageable tasks and really see and track the impact of your work on your life so as i mentioned before in the intro at the start of the year i have an in-depth process that i work through to set my goals for the year and to break those goals down into specific smaller objectives during this process i choose up to three objectives to assign to each month of the year and i lay them out as a reference so before the year begins i actually have a skeleton overview of what i'm focused on for any given month in the monthly planning video that i just posted last week you saw me pull my objectives from the inserts that they're mapped out on and transfer those to my monthly calendar spread so that is really the first part of my yearly planning process the actual goal setting and turning those goals into objectives so if you want to learn how to replicate my process for goal setting it is pretty comprehensive so i'm not going to be able to cover it in today's video but i do have it broken out in detail in the you got this workbook and also in the new year's goal setting and planning master class that's inside of the productivity and planning mastermind membership so i'll leave you links down in the description for where you can get those if you're interested in learning how i set my goals for the year so once i know what the specific objectives are that i'm working on for the month right which again they've already been laid out ahead of time at the start of the year when i'm walking into a new month in order to kind of break out those objectives into tasks that go into my monthly master task list into my monthly plan i need to do a little bit of project planning now let me be honest with you for some of my objectives it is necessary for me to break down that objective into small action steps on a project plan but i don't make a project plan for every single objective anymore i used to do that but i found that it was actually overkill for some of the objectives and types of projects that i do repeatedly year or after year specifically things in my business that i kind of know how to do by heart or i have simplified the process so it really is only a handful of steps maybe like three steps which feels like overkill for a project plan right so let me go ahead and show you inside my planner and give you a really good example of this okay so for my example let me walk you through the objectives for january as you can see for january i had three objectives laid out that i did complete all three of them but i did not end up needing to create a project plan for any of these now the first one as you can see here is vision board party so this actually isn't the best example because my vision board party or my master class my monthly master class and my membership is always held the first saturday of the new month and in january that was the second so actually this being on my top three just indicated that i had to host it like and make sure everything was ready for it but i had actually completed all of the work for it in december moving on i also had to update my welcome sequence this is a really good example of a task where it's something that i've done so often and it really only has a few steps that i don't necessarily feel the need to break it out into like tons of little pieces so with this objective all i really needed to do was read over and rewrite three emails that's my my welcome sequence now if i wanted to be like anal and break that project into many more pieces i guess i could have right i think we can break anything into my new task to track but but for me that strategy isn't necessary i will say between you and i i see a lot of people in the planning community oftentimes influencers i mean showing how they break down goals into smaller tasks and often i think it's overkill just to have more things to check off their to-do lists if having more tasks listed to track inspires and motivates you to actually get work done by all means go ahead and do that or if you're just someone who doesn't know how to reach an objective by heart and needs the steps broken down for reference and tracking please don't skip out on making project plans because they can be an excellent tool for accountability i just know for me that if i over complicate a project with too many tasks it overwhelms me and i might fear starting it so instead just thinking that i have like two or three things to do for an objective actually gets me started and if i have a few extra tasks that pop up while i'm working on an objective that's fine because i have the momentum built up of starting but that's me so clearly i'm a productive person who knows how to manage my time and accomplish many objectives and goals in a year so do not hold yourself to my standards if you aren't at that level of confidence and self-accountability in your work yet you will get there if you follow my methods and planning philosophy just trust the process and just to round out the january examples the final objective here that was on my top three was for a promotional bundle sale in my shop that didn't need a project plan i map promotions onto a campaign builder insert from the ceo strategy planner and that's how i track like the post that i'm going to share with the promotion so it's not like a lot of like tasks to do it's more of like when i'm gonna be posting what that's all so again instead of these priorities these objectives being put on project plans i just listed the tasks out in my monthler on my monthly master task list for january and that was it right and i'm just sharing this with you to illustrate that sometimes project plans are necessary and sometimes they're not i wouldn't get overly worked up about creating project plans for everything that you do i certainly don't do that okay so now that you see that i don't project plan every objective let's talk about how i do project plan for the objectives that do need it so i actually have two styles of project planning inserts that i use one is my standard project planning worksheets that come bundled with the master planner or you can get the bundle a la carte in my shop the other insert is my strategic project planning insert from the ceo strategy planner so today i'm actually going to be showing you how i use this strategic insert as i map out an objective that actually belongs to the month of june so why are we going to be project planning an objective for june so early because i actually need to start talking about this objective now to make sure that everything does go smoothly in june so the objective that we are going to work on today and you can see here on this page this first page of this strategic business plan it's kind of like an area for you to actually map out the objective and brainstorm ideas for tasks so then you can then go ahead and order those tasks on your project plan sheet so the objective that we are actually going to be creating this plan for is for a planner design course i've been asked to do a class like this for years now and i'm finally doing it so this class is actually going to be launching in june and if you want to get more information about the class i'll go ahead and leave a link where you can get on my email list and be the first to learn about when it's available but for now let's go ahead and map out this objective onto the insert oh hey editing alexis here um i just wanted to add in at this point in the video that this objective that we are mapping out right now to create a planner insert design course is an objective that i laid out in the beginning of the year when i was planning my goals i think i've made that pretty clear but the goal that this belongs to is the goal for me to make a certain amount of income in my business so that was one of my goals for the year that i laid out at the start of the year one of the solutions to that or objectives that i decided to you know go for this year was to create this class um or course and it was scheduled into my objectives for you know the month of june and now we are planning it out and mapping out the project plan so i just wanted to kind of give you guys that little piece so that you understand that like that's how the goal setting plays into the objective setting how that plays into the project planning and then the project plans that we create today will eventually be going into the tasks they're going to be going into my monthly calendar for june once we get there make sense okay back to the video so like i said put the title of the objective here my objective is to you know put together a planner insert design class now on this bottom part of the worksheet i want to kind of create a workflow so what are the no i have here you can see three columns that say prerequisite known steps and follow-up so basically the way i do this is i kind of brain dump the known steps that i can think of so when you're breaking down any objective into the small tasks even if you've never done the thing before i bet you can think of some things that you might need to do in order to make it happen so for me right now my known steps well first of all i know i need to do a landing page now i need to create a landing page for info sign ups like a wait list okay that's what i'll call it a wait list and forgive me if this project plan doesn't go super smoothly it is a little bit hard and i am trying to plan like in real time with you guys it's a little bit hard to like process your thoughts and create the plan but i wanted to kind of show you a little bit more authentically how i do something like this okay so the wait list landing page for you guys to get info on it that's the first known step is there anything i need to do necessarily before that i probably could do a graphic if i wanted to right just like a graphic that goes on that page right okay so anything that would come after that um i could set up like an auto email sequence and i'm going to write that down here i don't think i'm gonna do that though okay so i don't really think i want to do that but i could do something where when you guys sign up on the landing page wait list you get an email that says thank you for joining the list i'll send you more information like maybe i'll do that like maybe i will um put do like a follow-up i have to think about it this isn't something that sounds like a priority for me though but actually i'm kind of getting ahead of myself i really shouldn't be like analyzing what i'm doing right now i should just be brain dumping so okay so we got the landing page perhaps to a graphic perhaps do a follow-up auto email sequence that's fine um the next thing when it comes to the class is i have to like actually brain dump my ideas okay for what i want to include in that class and then i need to create like an outline there probably isn't something that needs to happen before that truthfully um i just need to start like listing out what i want to include in the class and then create the outline for it okay so once i've got like the brain dump and an outline um i can create the lessons right so i don't know how many modules i'm going to have but i'm going to need to write them out first right like i need to have a schematic of what i'm going to be teaching in the class and generally when i do classes i will write out like a full lesson first for a module and then after that i can film the modules because this is definitely going to be obviously a video course um once the modules are created the next anything before that creating the lessons no just the outline the outline comes before it okay so i could put outline here all right i need to have an outline it's a little bit overkill i can kind of understand the flow of this um once the modules are filmed again filming the modules is something that i will do after they were are laid out um and once they're filmed i'll probably create the handout okay which is important and inserts i'm just gonna put that in one step right now and then oh you know what film modules and edit obviously get them edited then i need to build a website out for it okay so i need to build the site page for the course very important before i can do that i need to decide where it's going on my site like which of my sites i have a couple of different like sub domain websites where i keep my classes um so i have to decide where i want to put it but once i know where it's going i can actually build the page for the course um obviously then load the videos next thing then would be like load the resources etc etc i'm also going to need a shop listing see having done this so often you know with classes and stuff i kind of know the flow of what needs to happen so i need a shop listing and i need a sales page which means i'm also going to need graphics and once i have that all done i'll need to build a marketing campaign and like i said my marketing campaigns it's a different insert that i actually use let me say i can pull one up i'm sure you guys have seen these before yeah here we go this is my campaign builder insert so what i'll do when i get to this that part of the process is i will go ahead and create a campaign but i hate doing these too far in advance i will wait until everything is ready to go for the launch um so then building the marketing campaign and then after that you know that's going to be like build the marketing campaign execute on that that's kind of its own little thing and then i might want to do some sort of evergreen email sequence right okay so that is everything right now that i can think of that i would do for this design class now does this mean that it's everything that i'm gonna do for it um possibly not possibly not but this is like probably going to get me most of the way with my project plan so the next thing i'm going to do is actually go ahead and fill out the project plan now that we've like brain dumped all those ideas so the project plan is just about reordering things into a more strategic process and what i like about this project plan that's different than my other project planning inserts this is really more for like business objectives is that it has areas for phases and the like final due dates that you want things to be done by so you know i think a general project plan doesn't always need that information obviously you could add that information in at any point in the other project planning inserts but these ones are for more strategic like do this than that than this next etc etc so i will go ahead and i will fill this out and i'll probably just speed it up because you guys kind of already know everything about this plan okay so now i have the project plan mapped out for this objective so um you can see here that i was actually able to break this project into four phases so the first phase is the pre-planning phase that i'm actually going to start now right because like i said i told you guys i'd give you guys a wait list like landing page for more information so i need to put that together before this video goes live so technically the start date for this project is now right so uh february then i'm also going to actually start doing my brain dump and the outline for the um the class now right so i am going to go ahead and create an actual apple notes note on my computer and i will just start brain dumping the lessons that i would like to teach people and i will do that for the next couple of months as we approach june so that hopefully walking into june i can actually have um the outline actually created even before you know i'm getting to the you know writing and creating it next phase is the lesson plan this is where i'm going to basically write the modules film them edit upload the videos create any handouts or inserts that go along with it it's hard to say specifically what i'm going to be doing for those sorts of things now and i don't i have any idea right now how many modules there will be so this is just like a general overview of the steps that i need to do for the lesson plan like i kind of hope i you know explained earlier in this video you know i could break anything down into tiny little minute tasks and sometimes that's necessary and sometimes it's not necessary in this situation for me it's not necessary i have tons of experience of building classes and courses out this is not a new process to me so i know that this is enough information for me to get started and get the work done next phase is to actually build the course website this is where i'm going to choose the subdomain build the course pages out i don't know right now again if it's going to be one page multiple pages we'll see what ends up happening upload the videos to the site upload the resources to the site as well and then sales and marketing i need to create those marketing graphics i need to create the sales page decide pricing and what the promotion is going to be for the launch i need to create the shop listing do the marketing campaign and then of course the evergreen campaign after the live launch is done because this is likely something that i'm going to just make you know the replay available i'll do it you know semi live once and perhaps do an evergreen campaign after that doesn't mean i'll never you know do another live launch again but that's generally how i start you know all of my courses out that are new so um other than that only thing of interest really is i did not put due dates in here other than for these first two items because we're really not close enough to have uh landing page information for you guys everything else i have to see when it gets closer to june what my schedule looks like what's going on in my life choose the actual day for the launch etc etc so um that is how i break an objective into a project plan and i hope that this has been helpful for you guys again if you want any of these inserts we still have that code feb 2021 running for 20 off all of the planning tools in my shop which includes all of my inserts so i will of course leave information about that down below and all of these inserts so that you guys can you know start planning and get really strategic with your objectives so that you get your goals complete for the year as well so that is my process for project planning and a little bit more of the how i get from specific goals and objectives to the actual tasks that i will take during the course of a month to move a goal forward i hope this video has been helpful for you and given you some ideas for strategies that you can implement with your planning in order to move your goals forward as well of course i just want to remind you that i still have processes that i take for weekly and daily planning that are separate from the idea of goal setting and project planning and my monthly planning process there's still processes that i take on a weekly and daily basis to actually take all of those plans that i've mapped out for a month and actually schedule them into my weeks now i may do a video on those in the future but i just wanted to make sure that you were clear that there are separate processes that i take for every step in the process i would love to hear in the comments one takeaway from this video that you are going to start implementing one change one tip i may be provided that you really felt was impactful let me know one thing you are going to do now that you've watched this video to make better plans for your life and in your planner if you enjoyed today's video please make sure to give it a thumbs up and feel free to share it with anyone you think would find it helpful for more of the behind the scenes of my productivity life and business make sure you're following me on instagram at miss trenchcoat and if you are not yet subscribed to my channel what are you waiting for hit that subscribe button for more awesome videos by me and until next time bye-bye you
2021-02-17 07:08
