Mise en place is a French culinary term that refers to the process of preparing all necessary ingredients and equipment before cooking a dish. This is considered crucial in cooking because it enhances efficiency and safety, allowing chefs to focus on delivering a high-quality meal.
Implementation plans are the mise en place of project management. By outlining your resources and action plans ahead of time, your projects can run safely, smoothly, and with a focus on quality.
In this article, we learn about the concept of an implementation plan, why it’s important, and outline steps and best practices for creating one that works for your team.
What is an Implementation Plan?
An implementation plan is a document outlining how a team executes on a project or strategy. An effective implementation plan clearly defines the following:
- Tasks: these are the actionable steps that the team needs to accomplish to deliver on the project.
- Teams, members, roles, and responsibilities: this identifies who is involved with the project and how they are expected to contribute. This also helps inform which tasks are assigned to each team member.
- Timelines and milestones: these are expectations on when tasks, features, or other forms of output need to be delivered for project success.
- Resources: beyond the team, hardware and software, as well as budget information, are included.
- Processes: this includes risk identification and management plans, communication plans, monitoring and quality control, delivery, and other standard practices the team uses to collaborate.
- Metrics: Key performance indicators (KPIs) and other acceptance criteria for tasks, which help determine whether individual tasks, milestones, or the project as a whole is a success.
The implementation plan is the building block that follows the strategic plan—whereas the latter defines the long-term vision and your team’s why, the implementation plan is then designed to answer how the team will achieve that vision.
Why an Implementation Plan Matters
Like all project management tools and activities, an implementation plan is designed to increase your project’s success rate. An implementation plan helps to create the following advantages for your team:
1. Clarity and direction
You can’t expect to deliver a cohesive, let alone functional, product or experience if your team is pulled in different directions. A project implementation plan serves as a single reference, helping to align team members on shared goals and ensuring that expectations are both set and met in the project life cycle.
2. Improved communication
Clear expectations lead to improved communication. When team members understand their responsibilities, check-ins are simplified, and accountability for completing tasks is strengthened. This reduces overlap in effort, helping to optimize the use of time and budget on the project.
3. Organizes information
This also aids in making sure that information can be accessed where it is expected, by the people who need it. When your team members have sufficient access to relevant information, they make faster, better decisions. This further increases team efficiency, which, when done consistently, adds up over time.
4. Minimizes risk
Projects are composed of many moving parts, and a small change can create major problems for your team. But when information moves freely and properly through your team, it’s easier to spot risks from further away, giving you more time and resources to either minimize or prevent them from impacting your productivity.
An implementation plan promotes efficiency by establishing a shared vision, streamlining communication, organizing information, and proactively managing risks.
A 4-Step Guide to Effective Implementation Planning
Now that we understand the concept and importance of the implementation plan template, it’s time to build your own.
For starters, an implementation plan is a document, and by now, it’s highly recommended that you use a tool that allows for real-time, online collaboration—this helps reinforce the advantage of keeping information accessible and, as a living document, allows your team to keep the plan updated every step of the way.
Once you’ve set up a document, it’s time to add the following:
1. Goals and communication
Your implementation plan should outline specific objectives based on your overall strategy: what are we trying to achieve? What deliverables are expected from this project?
From there, goals extend into metrics, which are used to monitor and evaluate progress. Consider whether time, output, or performance-based metrics are necessary to include using these guide questions:
- Time: When should x be accomplished?
- Output: In what format/medium should a delivery be made?
- Performance: What indicates that the delivery/output is a success?
Familiarity with setting SMART goals will be very helpful in this step.
From here, you will want to start documenting the ways in which your team communicates: What goes through email? Does your team use any real-time chat tools? Will feedback be coursed through there, or through your task/project management tool of choice? That way, you can keep all information easily accessible while working on your project.
2. Research, resources, roles, and responsibilities
After setting your objectives, it’s time to take a look at the resources at your disposal. This includes your overall timeline, your budget, as well as your team members who can be assigned to work on the project—think of this step as if you’re preparing all your ingredients before you start cooking a meal.
Capacity planning and building a RACI chart are great skills to have during this stage of implementation planning. When identifying team members for the project, it’s important to consider not just their skills, but also their availability. You will also want to consult with them as you build more of your implementation plan, as their expertise provides perspective and insight that you might lack.
3. Risk assessment and management
Once you’ve conducted an inventory of your resources, you will notice potential gaps in your capacity, whether that’s a lack of manpower or skills, specific hardware or software, budget, or time. Factors such as PTO and holidays will directly impact your team’s capacity in certain periods, which will require you to adjust timelines or move around resources as necessary in order to keep the project on track.
If you don’t have one yet, building a risk register is a great way to support your implementation plan. A SWOT analysis is also commonly used to aid in risk management, as well as in the research stage.
One underrated step you can take from here is to actually address any risks that are easily solvable before you start the project. The more risk you can eliminate before the project starts, the less likely for things to snowball at more crucial stages in your project.
4. Tasks, milestones, and assignments
Most people define an implementation plan with an emphasis on the steps or tasks, so you might wonder why it falls essentially last on our step-by-step guide. This brings us back to our research and capacity planning efforts: tasks are most effectively defined by the experts, who are your team members. By having a clear view of who is involved in the project, you have a solid network of knowledge from which to properly build an action plan.
From there, you will want to map out tasks and assign them to appropriate team members based on their skills. A Gantt chart is the go-to solution here, as it provides an intuitive look into how tasks might or need to be scheduled. Integration helps here, as your project management tool will likely already have Gantt chart functionality built in, which means you don’t need to try and recreate a Gantt chart’s features directly on the document, and instead export your task list in that format, or link to it in the document.
It’s also important to leave wiggle room in your timeline, as it is next to impossible to fully account for every risk or change, especially for longer projects. Equally important is identifying and highlighting dependencies, which also help inform specific priorities between related tasks.
Last but not least, assign these tasks to your team members based on their role in the project and their known skills.
Once you’ve documented the above, you now have a working version of the implementation plan that you can use to start work on the project. But the implementation planning doesn’t stop there.
Remember: an implementation plan is a living document, which means you and your team will need to update it as you learn more about the project along the way. This is especially important when new risks or issues are identified, as well as any changes to the timeline caused by updates to the scope or your team’s capacity.
FAQs
What’s the difference between an implementation plan and a strategic plan?
As we described above, an implementation plan acts as a building block that goes on top of a strategic plan. This makes them different in a few ways:
- Purpose and time frame: A strategic plan outlines a long-term vision, which informs a more specific set of goals and objectives for an implementation plan, often achievable in a shorter time frame. This is typically the full length of a specific project, instead of the typical quarterly or yearly window that strategic plans account for.
- Audience: A strategic plan takes a high-level approach and speaks more to people like executives and investors. An implementation plan is aimed more at project managers and teams.
How about a project plan?
While an implementation plan and a project plan are related, they are also made distinct by their audience.
An implementation plan is designed primarily for the team working directly on the project, and focuses on specific actions and decisions that enable them to deliver the exact type and quality of work expected.
A project plan acts as more of an overview of the project, which trades specificity for range, and speaks more to executives, customers, or other stakeholders. The project plan is designed to give them visibility into the project, without overwhelming them with the more technical details.
Business plan?
Ultimately, an implementation plan shares a relationship with the business plan, but it is much more removed compared to a strategic or project plan.
A business plan will often precede all other plans, as it describes the business as a whole—its core audience, business model, the range of products or services it intends to offer, effectively providing a case for why the business is necessary or worth investing in. A business plan informs the strategy, which informs the project and implementation.
The implementation plan is a much more specific set of guidelines for how one project in the overall strategy is executed, and is designed in alignment with the business and strategy plans.
For a quick comparison between the above project management tools, refer to the table below:
What are typical risks/challenges to watch out for while building an implementation plan?
An implementation plan both relies on and informs other project management resources to work. Here are a few challenges to anticipate when building your implementation plan:
- Lack of clear strategy: Since an implementation plan builds on an established strategy, a poorly planned one makes for a shaky foundation. Consider treating strategy planning as an entirely prerequisite task to implementation planning, and working on that before investing in the execution, to ensure that the team and the project align with long-term goals.
- Resistance to standards and change: Having a cross-functional team means you have a team with a wide range of perspectives, preferences, and working styles. This can make it difficult to align on a strategy, especially when it affects their day-to-day process, making it all the more important to involve them in the planning stages, so you can make meaningful compromises as well as communicate and enforce a shared ownership of both the project and process required to deliver quality work.
One challenge that often flies under the radar is a lack of awareness of the sheer depth of options when it comes to project management tools. In implementation planning alone, knowing how to use tools like the Gantt chart, RACI chart, risk registers, and capacity planning tools provides a huge boost to productivity. Beyond this, a robust project management tool will be helpful in bridging your implementation plan with actual execution.
Build and Execute Your Marketing Implementation Plan with Workamajig
An implementation plan acts as your team’s roadmap for bringing a strategy to life. By thoroughly documenting how a project needs to be executed, you give them a clear vision, clear instructions, and a runway for ensuring a smooth delivery. To help with this, you will need a project management tool that bridges planning and action.
With Workamajig, the ultimate project management software, you have an all-in-one solution for plotting tasks, allocating work, and seamlessly transitioning into task and resource management. Migrate your implementation plan into a usable task list, then use built-in collaboration and reporting tools to ensure that your team stays on top of the work, completing tasks and addressing roadblocks along the way.
Originally published September 30, 2025.