Strategy Survival Guide

Strategy Survival Guide Version 2.1
Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit
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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.
Workstream
focused
Process/
Deliverable
focused
Scenario
Development
Report
Writing
Stakeholder
Management
Modelling,
Review of
externalities,
International
Rationale for
intervention
Delivering
the vision
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.
Strategy Survival Guide – Strategy Skills
Page 66