2. Action plan tasks. These tasks are more complicated and cannot be easily completed without good thought and planning. These are some examples:

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1 Tool 4 For Effective Action Plans, GAS IT At the most basic level, a manager s job is to get stuff done. The management part comes into play because a manager must get stuff done by directing the actions of others. The stuff that must get done can be sorted into two categories: 1. Basic punch list tasks. These are tasks that do not require complicated direction or planning. They are simple, direct, and easy to delegate. These are some examples: Change the burned-out lightbulb above the front door. Count the money in the safe. Replenish the red T-shirts on the front table. Return the phone call from the customer who called yesterday. 2. Action plan tasks. These tasks are more complicated and cannot be easily completed without good thought and planning. These are some examples: Train the team on the new sales process. Build a new process for processing merchandise shipments. Teach salespeople how to overcome customer objections. Remerchandise the main sales floor. The basic punch list tasks can be executed or delegated without much more direction. The information necessary to complete the task is contained within the task description itself or is easily understood due to common sense and prior training. For instance, everybody knows how to change a lightbulb, and counting the money in the safe is straightforward if the person is familiar with the policy and process. The action plan tasks are not necessarily as easy. These are bigger projects, and the way forward is not always so clear. Many different paths can be taken, and the correct paths might depend on numerous variables that are hard to explain. Assign any of these tasks to twenty different people, and you will most likely end up with twenty different approaches. To ensure effective implementation, these tasks require additional planning. 51

2 One interesting challenge is that it s not always easy to determine whether certain tasks fall into the punch list category or the action plan category. A task might, on the surface, appear to be simple and straightforward enough to complete in punch list fashion. It might not be until after that approach fails that a manager realizes it should have had an action plan. Suffice it to say that when in doubt, err on the side of categorizing tasks as action plan items. Sometimes managers jot down a few steps they will take to accomplish a task and call it their action plan. The action plan is only effective if the steps appropriately capture every important aspect of solving the problem at hand. As a simple example, consider the goal of driving cross-country from New York to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Imagine this is the action plan: 1. Fill the car with fuel. 2. Get on Interstate Drive west. 4. Upon arriving in San Francisco, follow signs to Route 101 North. Obviously a lot of steps are missing from this action plan. The most obvious are specific driving directions from Interstate 78 to San Francisco. But there are a lot of other considerations missing. This trip will cost quite a bit of money. How will the driver pay for tolls, fuel, and food along the way? How much money does the driver need to take along? The trip will take at least forty hours of continuous driving time. How many times will the driver need to stop for sleep and rest, and where will that be done? Are hotel reservations needed? Depending on the time of year, some parts of the route might be impassable due to snow. What route is the best to take given weather conditions? In this example, an effective action plan isn t just about being specific about all the individual steps of driving directions. It also involves a lot of other elements not directly related to driving. How often, when facing a big objective, does a manager just fill up the tank with fuel and drive west? Or how often does a manager think he has a really comprehensive action plan simply because he printed out turn-by-turn instructions from MapQuest? The truth is, if he hasn t built in solutions for all the other elements that might have a bearing on success, he doesn t have a good action plan at all. Tool 4 is a model to help managers build more comprehensive and effective action plans. Use of this tool is not easy to master, and it will take many attempts to attain a high level of proficiency. But even low proficiency with this model leads to better results than the use of action plans built without the structure of this model. Tool 4 is this: 52

3 An explanation of each part of the model is as follows: Goal The GAS IT Action Planning Model Goal: Understand the problem to be solved, and clearly define the goal. Alignment: Attack the problem from every angle, ensuring all attacks are aligned. Steps: List the detailed steps that must be taken. Inspection: Build in follow-up to ensure steps are implemented properly. Tracking: Watch for results, and ensure they are in line with original intentions. Before you can hope to have an effective action plan, you must have a clear understanding of the problem you re trying to solve. And you must turn that into a clear definition of the goal you are hoping to achieve through the action plan. In Lesson 5, outlined are the bad things that can happen when goals are out of sync with higher-level organizational objectives. And then in Lesson 6, the importance is emphasized of getting to real root causes rather than just solving surface symptoms of a deeper problem. These lessons also apply to action plans. Let s consider a common example. A senior executive notices the conversion rate is suffering at a particular store location. Conversion rate (number of closed sales in relation to number of customers) is a common measure of sales effectiveness. The executive s quick conclusion is that the salespeople in this store must be retrained on the sales process. An action plan is created that has the district s training manager holding classes for the store s sales team and has the store manager role-playing with each salesperson over the succeeding four weeks. Lots of energy goes into retraining the team, but in the end, conversion rate doesn t improve. Why doesn t this action plan work? Maybe the salespeople don t have the innate skills to be good sellers. Maybe the salespeople aren t engaged in their jobs and aren t putting in effort when the manager isn t watching them. Maybe it has nothing at all to do with the salespeople and instead is due to the stockroom team not getting inventory to the sales floor. Maybe a new movie theater and two popular new restaurants just opened at the same mall, so the store is getting a sharp increase in just looking traffic that is harder to convert. Without knowing for sure what the real problem with conversion rate is, it is impossible to establish the right goal for the action plan. In this case, retrain the sales team is probably not the right goal. The right goal would be to increase conversion rate. Yes, that leads to a much broader action plan. But narrowing the focus should be part of the action plan. The first part of the action plan might be to properly research the source of the problem. In fact the best solution might involve a couple separate action plans. The first action plan should 53

4 be to identify the cause of the decline in conversion rate. The second action plan should be to fix the problem identified by the first action plan. When defining the goal, it s a good idea to state exactly what the tangible result will be when the action plan is complete and the goal is achieved. The result should be quantifiable to whatever degree it can be. In some cases the goal is to simply start or stop a particular behavior. The tangible result is a defined level of consistency in the presence (or absence) of that behavior. Establishing the right goal is the critical first step to an effective action plan. It doesn t do any good to jump to actions that might take the team on an unnecessary detour. Alignment Alignment is the act of getting multiple parts lined up in correct and appropriate positions relative to one another. There are two halves to this definition: Steps 1. The first half is multiple parts. This implies that the action plan has multiple pieces that work together to drive success. Every element of operating a business has more than one factor that influences its execution. A simple task such as balancing the money in a cash register till is influenced by the total amount of cash transactions completed, the cashier s attention to detail, the amount of time allotted for balancing, the paperwork used to record balancing results, and the consequences involved with failing to balance accurately. To build an action plan that improves cash register balancing accuracy, a manager should try to include all of these factors in the action plan. 2. The second half is lined up in correct and appropriate positions relative to one another. This means all the factors incorporated into the action plan must be work together with the other factors and not against them. For example, the cashier s attention to detail might be negatively impacted by a decision to give cashiers only five minutes after store closing to balance their tills. If that were the case, the amount of time allotted for balancing would work against as opposed to being lined up with the intention to increase cashiers attention to detail. This part of the GAS IT model is self-explanatory. Steps means to literally list all the detailed steps necessary to execute the action plan. The objective is to avoid leaving anything open for interpretation. Going back to the analogy about driving from New York to San Francisco, this part of the model is the turn-by-turn instructions mapped out for the entire trip. If a particular action requires having a conversation with somebody, scheduling a special block of time for the action to be completed, and then completing the action, it is actually three separate steps. Each step must be listed. 54

5 An important aspect of this part of the model is that each individual step must also have an owner and a deadline. It must be clear who will execute the step and when. Inspection Effective completion of an action plan requires good follow-up. Every step should be followed up on to ensure it was completed properly. If everything was done right, followup gives the manager a chance to provide positive reinforcement and appreciation. If something was not done right, it gives the manager the chance to correct the action and coach in whatever way is necessary and appropriate. Follow-up should occur as soon after the deadline as possible. If the step was executed incorrectly and follow-up occurs too long afterward, it is too late to prevent a negative impact on subsequent steps. A failure at Step 5 in a process, for example, might cause problems with Steps 6, 7, and 8. When follow-up finally happens at Step 9, there are five steps that must be redone instead of just one. Most people don t have the luxury of having so much time to redo that much work. Tracking Once the action plan is completed, there should be some tangible result that ties back to the original goal. Remember that in the Goal part of the model, it is advised to state exactly what result is desired after successful implementation of the action plan. The action plan is not complete until it is measured and the results are tracked. If the results match the stated goal, fantastic. If the results do not match the stated goal, something went wrong along the way. Retrace the actions to determine what went wrong. Using the model itself, here is a series of questions to ask: Did we start with the right goal? Did we properly identify all the multiple parts? Were our parts all well-aligned? Did we list all of the steps needed? Did we properly execute all the steps listed? If our results are not in line with our expectations, the answer generally lies somewhere within those five questions. In summary, the GAS IT model is a tool to help managers build effective action plans to solve their most challenging problems. While it might seem like an onerous process at first, when used consistently, the GAS IT model becomes a natural way of thinking for managers. 55