Summary

• Break any plan down into at least three phases

• This will help make it much easier to understand and execute

 

WAR

 

Imagine that you’re a lieutenant in the Marine Corps. You are commanding a platoon of 40 infantry Marines. Your commanding officer has tasked you with attacking an enemy squad that is dug into three trenches with a razor wire obstacle in your way.  

This is a very complicated and dangerous mission.

There are hundreds of things that would need to happen to execute this type of an attack. 

1. Load the assault positions
2. Forward observer call for indirect fire 
3. Signal suppression is good 
4. Machine guns load the hot position 
5. Machine guns start suppression on Bunkers 1 and 2 
6. Internal suppression of the breach 
7. Engineers explosive breach of the wire obstacle 
8. On and on and on

If you use phased planning, you can summarize the attack and make it much easier to understand.  

At a high level, there are three phases to this attack:

Phase 1: Opening the breach 

• Phase 1 starts when 81mm mortars have gotten effective suppression on the objective observed by the 1st squad leader. 
• Phase 1 ends when the breach has been opened by combat engineers and is ready for the 2nd squad to flow through.

Phase 2: Assaulting the trenches 

• Phase 2 starts when the breach has been opened by the combat engineers.
• Phase 2 ends when all three trenches have been cleared. 

Phase 3: Consolidation

• Phase 3 starts when the third trench has been cleared.
• Phase 3 ends with the three squads consolidated in each trench, all ammo has been distributed and any casualties have been moved to Trench 1. 

These three phases take a very complicated operation and give it a simple structure and a clear story. That is the power of phased planning. 

 

 

Principles of phased plans

 

Two principles are used when breaking a plan down into phases. 

1. You should only have three to five phases. 
2. Each phase should have a clear start and end. 

The power of a phased plan is in the simplicity and clarity. The limited number of phases and clear start and end drive it. 

 

Limited number of phases 

 

Three is the most common number of phases. Just like in every good story, every plan has at least a beginning, middle and end. 

1. The beginning is prepping and preparing to do the work. 
2. The middle is doing the work. This is where a few extra phases can make sense, if the work needs to be broken down a few times. 
3. The end is when we wrap up and move to a steady state or prepare for the next operation. 

There may be some instances where more than five phases are needed. However, for a large majority five will be sufficient. Anything over five and you start to lose the simplicity that makes phased planning so powerful. 

 

Start and end

 

Each phase should have a distinct start and end. This gives the plan a step by step flow, making it logical and easy to follow. 

The end of the phase gives the team a clear short term goal to work towards. For each phase to end,  certain conditions must be met. These conditions must be in place and complete before you are ready to move to the next phase. Setting the conditions to complete the phase will be the focus of the team. 

In actual execution of the plan, there isn’t likely to be a hard stop and end to each phase. The phases will blend together. Work for Phase 3 will start while Phase 2 is still going. That is always the case. You don’t need to wait around to start the next phase because the previous phase hasn’t ended. 

 

The story of the plan

 

Humans have learned through storytelling since the dawn of time. Your team and your leadership are no different. They want you to tell them the story of how all this work is going to go. 

A phased structure to your plan gives you a story. 

In Phase 1, we are going to assemble the team, come together and prepare for battle. Then, in Phase 2, we’re going to go into battle together. We will destroy all the work monsters as a team. After all of the work monsters have been destroyed, we’ll collect our glory and ride off into the sunset. 

That’s your story. You just have to replace the work monster with a consulting project, product launch, growth plan, accounting audit, or whatever your team is working on. 

A story will give your team and your leadership confidence in you and your plan.  

 

BUSINESS 

 

Phased planning doesn’t take very much translating to put into a business context. Everything that is written above directly applies to the business world. 

When you are leading a planning session or contributing to a plan you should start with a few questions:

1. What are the three to five phases we can break this work up into?
2. What are the distinct starts and ends of each of those phases? 

Once you have those two questions answered, your plan pretty much builds itself. 

The following is an example of a phased plan for integrating a software system into your company. 

Software deployment phased plan: 

1. Planning and confirming system needs 
   1. Starts with the team kick off meeting 
   2. Ends with the requirements document completed and signed off by both teams 
2. Setup of database and backend system 
   1. Starts with the requirements document agreed to 
   2. Ends when the backend systems have been tested and confirmed to be functional 
3. Configuration of frontend system 
   1. Starts when the backend system is functional 
   2. Ends when all requirements have been met for the frontend configuration 
4. Steady state system support 
   1. Starts when all of the frontend configuration is complete 
   2. Ends when the support team has been stood up and all support procedures have been agreed to 

 

 

The story of the plan

 

In the business world, everything will be briefed in PowerPoint or Google Slides. Phased planning works very well with slides. 

You will work from big to small. Introducing the overall plan and then each phase will get its own slide with one or two support slides each. The story will be very powerful and clear for your leadership and for your team.

 

Conclusion

 

The conclusion is to break your plans down into phases. If you do this, they will be much clearer and the story of the plan will be easy to tell. 

Try to have no more than five phases.There should be clear starts and ends for each one. In actual execution, the phases will blend together. However,  a delineation between phases makes them clear and easy to understand.