Planning starts once you have secured funding for your project. It involves giving tasks to staff members, distribute responsibilities and set a series of deadlines to respect the timeframe of the project in order to deliver the main results on time.
The first thing to do is to gather all the members of the organisation to discuss on the strategy to adopt to implement the project. It is true that you have written a proposal, which has been successful, but it is important to review your timetable in order to set internal deadlines and ensure that the project will unfold reaching its milestones as planned. This is the right moment to decide who is in charge of doing what. Make sure that everyone is happy about their roles in the project and that the potentials and skills of staff members are fully explored.
Task Assignment. A task is a job given to one member of the organisation that needs to be done by a set deadline. Tasks could be short or long. For instance, a short task could be to design a poster to invite people to participate in the project and it could be done in 1 week. A long task could be to attend all the trainings and observe the participants in order to understand their levels of satisfaction or to assess the facilitator’s performance. This information will be crucial in the monitoring phase to understand what could have been done differently in order to write a better training program in the future. This task will last for as many days as the training lasts (perhaps months). To write task is very important and it must be done considering all the activities that need to be completed to enable the project to develop as planned. Remember to write down all the tasks even when they seem trivial. For instance, to collect posters from the printing shop is a task and there should be someone in charge of it. If posters advertising the project are not disseminated on time, there will be a delay in gathering participants, which could cause a delay in starting the planned activities. As you can tell, all the activities have their own importance and there must be a person responsible for their completion. Further, giving tasks is also a way to make all the members of the organisation actively participating in the development of the project. It is a way to support teamwork and to improve the ability of team members to work together and to respect deadlines.
How to assign tasks. There is not a golden rule to assign tasks although there are factors to be considered. First of all, depending on the number of people working in your organisation, each member will be assigned with one or more tasks. Make sure that each member participates in all the phases of the project. As such, it is good practice to assign different tasks in different phases. Second, always suggest a group of people for a task and let them decide who is doing what. In doing so, you will make members of staff more responsible about their tasks. Third, if your organisation counts on the work of volunteers, make sure to name a supervisor among the members of staff who will be in charge of monitoring the volunteers’ work and to support them in their learning process. In doing so, you will be able to count on additional workforce and also to train individuals who might become permanent members of staff in the future.
