Creating a plan of action
EXPERIMENT This section is focused on testing your ideas and ensuring that your plans are as robust as possible. Projects rarely go totally to plan, and the more uncertainty there is, the more important it is to start small and build evidence of what will work in your particular context. Many practitioners will be familiar with monitoring and evaluation as a mechanism to measure and assess the outcome of a project. Rather than waiting until the end of a project to review the impact and if a solution worked, we encourage you to conduct small experiments and build more certainty from the outset. This sort of approach should continue throughout implementation, using data about what’s working to inform iterations and changes. This can complement any monitoring and evaluation processes in place.
A plan of action outlines how your city will reach its desired impact at scale. It provides clarity on what you believe you will need to do, and what resources (human and financial) you will need. The plan of action should include a view on how the idea will be environmentally, financially and systemically sustainable.
Plans in government have traditionally taken a ‘waterfall approach’ – a linear approach in which a plan is developed at the beginning of a project, and then the plan is followed through to implementation with limited opportunities to change the plan. Digital projects tend instead to take an ‘agile approach’ which allows for more ambiguity and flexibility in the plan. These plans have ‘test-learn-iterate’ cycles baked into the design and create the space to adapt the plan throughout implementation.
Local Action Plan
Create a document that sets out how you aim to achieve your vision.
HOW:
- Bring together your Local Action Group to develop the plan together
- Revisit the vision statement you created to guide the actions and resources you’ll plan for. A vision statement is the big picture of what you want to achieve.
- Working backwards from that vision, invite the group to draw out some specific, quantifiable objectives. Objectives are the ways that you’re aiming to achieve that vision.
- For each of these objectives, map out the following:
- What actions do you believe need to happen to achieve your objective?
- What team and budget will you need to implement these actions?
- What evidence will you need to see to know that you have achieved your objective?
- How will you collect the data needed to build this evidence?
- There is always a level of uncertainty in a Local Action Plan, and plans in general. Your plans should acknowledge the areas of uncertainty and assumptions being made, and set out clearly how you’ll gather data to test these assumptions throughout (read more in ‘testing through experiments’).
- What experiments might you be able to run early on to test assumptions and help determine the design of the product/service?
- What feedback loops could you establish in the service while it’s being implemented, to ensure you can continue to iterate as you implement?
- The plan should be a live document that is iterated regularly based on what is learnt.
