After a successful strategic planning session, you’ve emerged with a roadmap, vision and clearly defined goals and objectives for an exciting new project that you’re in charge of implementing. Now, the real fun begins! A little planning can go an incredibly long way toward your project’s success. However, if you’re not sure where to begin, here are a few key tips.

Financial Planning and Budgeting

Strong financial planning and modeling are the cornerstones of any successful project, and a well-structured budget can help you make informed decisions, anticipate challenges and make the most of your organization’s limited resources. Consider the following:

• Staffing Costs: This includes salaries, benefits and any other compensation-related expenses for project personnel, including new hires or consultants.
• Overhead Costs: Overhead costs include indirect expenses like utilities, office space, administrative support and other non-project-specific expenditures.
• Supplies and Equipment: Be sure to budget for any supplies, equipment or technology (hardware or software) you need for your project, as well as the cost of ongoing maintenance and updates.
• Honoraria: Include a line item for honoraria for any subject matter experts or faculty that will contribute to the development of your project.
• Other Production Costs: If there are other production costs like printing, shipping or manufacturing, add those in as well.
• Travel: If any travel is involved, be sure to budget for flights, ground transport, parking, hotels and per diems for team members and faculty.
• Staff Training and Development: Consider whether your team members have the skills they need to successfully implement this project. If not, include funding to upskill your team.
• Marketing: Marketing is key to generating revenue. Work closely with your marketing team to develop a robust marketing plan, then budget appropriately to ensure your project’s success.
• Revenue: If your project deliverables will be revenue-generating, strongly consider conducting some market research to help you define your target market, determine the appropriate price point and appropriately project your revenue. Also, are there grants/donations you could seek to offset costs?
• Data: For a realistic budget, take a data-driven approach based on facts like past performance and market research rather than wishful thinking. 
• Financial Modeling: While a data-driven approach optimizes your chances for success, you should always be prepared for any potential shifts in funding or revenue that could impact the financial stability of your project. Financial modeling can help you anticipate various financial scenarios and optimize your allocation of often limited resources. Your finance/accounting team can be a great resource in developing financial models that you can use to create contingency plans and make informed decisions.
• Mission Alignment: Finally, ensure your budget is aligned with your organization's mission as well as the goals set forth by your strategic planning committee.

Project Planning and Kick-off

Some of your initial project planning will happen in tandem with your budgeting and business plan development. You need to think through the following:

• Staffing: Think about who will work on this project. Will you use existing staff or hire new staff/consultants? What role will volunteers and/or committees play? How much time will they spend?
• Partnerships and Collaborations: Consider whether a partnership or collaboration with another organization might help you achieve common goals. Sometimes many hands make light work, while other times a collaboration could add additional complexity to a project or lengthen your timeline.
• Development Approach: Think about the approach you’ll take to developing any project deliverables. For example, an iterative design approach enables you to rapidly prototype and gain feedback on deliverables along the way to enable you to shift gears midstream if your designs aren’t resonating with end users. Also consider the role that pilot testers will play in helping you refine your deliverables.
• Project Timeline: Involve stakeholders and team members in setting and gaining buy in to develop a realistic timeline for the development of your project.
• Project Management Software: Select a tool to help keep track of your project’s timeline and your team’s progress toward key milestones. There are several threads on the Alliance listserv with great suggestions, such as this one or this one.
• Data: Consider what data you need to collect and how you will securely collect, store and manage access to it. You can read more about keeping your data safe in this Almanac article.
• Feedback Collection: Decide how you will collect and evaluate feedback from end users to inform future iterations of project deliverables.
• Communication and Meetings: A project kick-off meeting ensures everyone is on the same page regarding your target audience, goals, objectives, timeline and responsibilities. Consider setting a regular cadence for ongoing check-in meetings to keep your core team on track and foster ongoing collaboration and alignment within the project team.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Effective, proactive communication builds transparency and trust, so don’t forget to keep key stakeholders, including those involved in the strategic planning process, informed of your team’s progress. Conduct a stakeholder analysis to help you identify which stakeholders inside or outside of the organization to keep in the loop. 

Marketing and Promotion

A strong marketing plan is key to raising awareness and interest among your target audience members. Work with your marketing team to help them understand and/or define the following:

• Target Audience: Having a well-defined target audience will help your marketing team develop targeted promotions for project deliverables.
• Competitors’ Strengths and Weaknesses: Sharing this information enables your marketing team to find opportunities for differentiation that they can highlight in their promotions to set your project deliverables apart.
• Benefits and Outcomes: Knowing what makes your project special will help your marketing team communicate that to your target audience.
• Budget: Knowing any budget constraints helps your team appropriately allocate their marketing dollars across the delivery channels that will give you the most bang for your buck.
• Content Strategy: In addition to traditional product marketing, consider tactics such as creating blog posts, webinars, videos and whitepapers on the topic your deliverables focus on to establish your organization as a leader in this space and further drive engagement with your new project deliverables.
• Metrics: What key performance indicators (KPIs) will you use to track the success of your marketing campaigns, such as website traffic, conversion rates or purchase/enrollment/download numbers?

Monitoring, Evaluation, and Improvement

Once your project deliverables launch, you’ll want to take a proactive, ongoing approach to their monitoring, evaluation, and improvement to ensure your project’s continued success. Consider the following:

• Financial Performance: Throughout the entire project lifecycle, closely track your budget to make any necessary adjustments to continuously optimize your project’s financial health. 
• End-user Feedback: Feedback from end users will provide you with critical information to assess whether the project deliverables meet their expectations, identify any critical issues and inform future revisions. 
• Frequency of Reviews: Evaluating the budget and feedback should be a continuous process rather than something that only gets done on an annual basis. Determine who needs to engage with evaluation data, how often (e.g., bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly) and the level of detail each stakeholder needs to make critical decisions.
• Acting on Results: What good is your data if you don’t act on the results? It’s critical to put actionable plans in place to continuously improve your project deliverables based on evaluation results.

Conclusion

While the road to project implementation may be challenging, you can successfully navigate it through upfront, detailed planning and strategic foresight. While even the best-made plans can go awry, it’s critical to have contingency plans in place as well as a flexible attitude to help you nimbly respond to unforeseen challenges or opportunities.

Kellie Beumer, MBA, is the director of learning innovations for the American Society for Clinical Pathology, where she oversees the instructional design and delivery of ASCP's live and online education and grant writing efforts. With nearly 20 years of experience, she is passionate about leveraging her unique background in instructional design, molecular biology and business to help associations strategically develop innovative medical education solutions aligned with best practices in adult education and learner needs.