Projects are time-bound initiatives designed to produce unique products, services, or results. While planning is crucial, the most important part is execution, or doing the actual work.
Actions form the heart of project management. Without them, plans remain vague concepts that never materialize.
In this article, we’ll explore action plans: the strategic framework that transforms individual actions and capabilities into results greater than the sum of their parts.
What is an Action Plan?
An action plan is a list of tasks describing the work required to produce project deliverables. Following goal-setting and project planning, the action plan defines specific steps the team must take to achieve project milestones and transform plans into reality.
While PMBOK® Guide (Project Management Body of Knowledge) doesn’t explicitly define action plans as formal artifacts, they’re deeply embedded in project management processes. They are part of project plans, subsidiary plans, issue logs/risk registers, as planned actions or responses.
Key Elements of an Action Plan
Effective action plans include these essential components:
- Action: A clear description of the required activity
- Timeline: Deadline and/or duration, establishing when the action should begin and end
- Person In Charge/Owner: Project team member responsible for completing the action
- Action Status: Indicator of progress based on your project workflow
- Dependencies: Actions that need to be completed before the current action can proceed (e.g., before the website manager publishes an article, it needs to be approved by the editor-in-chief)
Project management tools such as Workamajig can automate notifications to relevant approvers when there are status changes, helping streamline communication and workflow progression.
How to Create and Monitor an Action Plan
Creating an effective action plan involves 9 steps:
- Define project goals and objectives
- Collect and analyze data
- Identify milestones and deliverables
- Plan action points
- Assign tasks
- Prioritize tasks
- Set deadlines
- Monitor and revise
- Assess and improve
Let’s dive into each of them.
Define Project Goals and Objectives
Understand what the project aims to achieve. While action plans typically focus on outputs, consider the desired outcomes–what results does the project intend to produce for the client or business? For example, the project deliverable might be a product landing page (output), but the outcome could be increased brand awareness and lead generation.
Collect and Analyze Data
With your project goals and objectives in mind, gather relevant data. This includes identifying risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies (RAID) across different project domains. Doing this early will help you manage risk and embed mitigation measures into your plans.
Identify Milestones and Deliverables
Milestones are checkpoints in project progress, while deliverables are verifiable project outputs. Their timing depends on your project methodology. Traditional approaches might place deliverables at the end of every project lifecycle phase. Meanwhile, adaptive project management approaches such as Agile Scrum deliver output in two-week sprints.
Plan Action Points
Once milestones and deliverables are established, identify the work required to achieve them. Consider creating a work breakdown structure (WBS), which is a hierarchical decomposition of a project into smaller, more manageable components. The WBS can provide an overview of the major parts of the project so you can plot actions around them more efficiently.
Work Breakdown Structure Example
Assign Tasks
Assign identified actions to project team members based on their skills, experience, and availability. This clarifies individual roles and responsibilities, building accountability and autonomy, which are vital traits for high-performing project teams.
Prioritize Tasks
Project resources are inherently limited, so prioritize tasks to ensure the most impactful work receives adequate attention. Prioritization matrices can guide this process.
Set Deadlines
Plotting tasks onto your project schedule embeds them into your team’s work days. Tools like Gantt charts provide visual representations of timelines and dependencies, helping ensure that dependencies are finished in the correct sequence and the project can progress smoothly.
Gantt Chart in Workamajig
Monitor and Revise
Project management doesn’t end with planning. As a project manager, you need to monitor progress, incorporate new information as the project unfolds, and revise accordingly. Projects rarely proceed exactly as planned, so your role in helping the team navigate changes and manage emerging tasks is vital.
Assess and Improve
At the end of sprints or key project milestones, evaluate what worked well and identify areas of improvement. This continues the learning process and helps the team evolve as experience accumulates. This can be done in formal retrospectives or less structured check-ins.
Benefits of an Action Plan
- Team Alignment: Visible action plans improve team coordination, showing everyone how their work contributes to the whole, increasing accountability and autonomy.
- Increased Productivity: When team members can perform effectively and address issues independently, overall team efficiency improves.
- Optimal Resource Allocation: Well-defined, prioritized actions enable better resource management, ensuring key aspects receive appropriate support.
- Improved Risk Mitigation: Early risk identification through comprehensive planning allows teams to prepare for likely scenarios and develop contingency plans.
- Measurable Success: Action plans provide clear success metrics, allowing for objective evaluation of progress and team performance.
Best Practices for Creating an Action Plan
Ensure Task Clarity
Provide sufficient task descriptions understandable to the project team. Include relevant, specific details and explain how tasks connect to project milestones. If a task result is difficult to describe, break it down further until it becomes more concrete.
Collaborate with Team
Planning, prioritizing, assigning, and scheduling action plans involve numerous data points. Leverage the expertise of stakeholders, including your project team. While not everyone needs to participate in planning, ensure each important expertise is represented.
Use Templates
Templates save time by pre-populating important information categories and ensure that critical details are included in your action plan.
Use Reliable Project Management Software
Action plans serve as both team guides and progress monitoring tools. Reliable project management software streamlines communication and focus so that team members can concentrate on their tasks while project managers monitor progress.
Tools like Workamajig, designed specifically for creative teams, offer robust project management and communication functionalities. These can help maximize the benefits of having organized project action plans, ultimately enhancing productivity, collaboration, and efficiency.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who makes the project action plans?
Team leaders typically craft action plans with input from relevant stakeholders. These may include project managers, team leaders, functional managers, or business managers responsible for project or process execution.
Which steps in developing an action plan include the process of brainstorming?
Brainstorming for specific tasks typically occurs after creating a work breakdown structure. Once key project aspects are identified through the WBS, team members can determine how to build toward each by brainstorming necessary tasks and actions.
What is an emergency action plan?
An emergency action plan is a documented set of actions to be taken when workplace emergencies occur.
Who should be trained on the contents of an emergency action plan?
Everyone potentially affected by an emergency should receive training on the emergency action plan’s contents.
Wrapping Up
The beauty of project teams and project management lies in their ability to produce outcomes greater than the sum of their contributions. This synergy requires effective collaboration and excellent planning aligned with project goals and objectives.
Crafting effective action plans involves sufficient context, skill, and insight, which are ideally developed collaboratively. Done well, action plans empower team members to create results that both they and their clients are proud of.
Originally published September 25, 2025.