As your business grows, there comes a point where there will be too much for any one team member to manage. And while a larger team can cover more ground, this falls apart when the effort is aimless and disorganized.
An operational plan helps to address this by acting as a guide for what work needs to be done, by whom, and when. By learning how to build an effective plan through this article, you can optimize your team’s day-to-day activities to ensure that strategic goals are met by quality output.
What is Operational Planning?
Operational planning is the process of building an action plan from high-level strategic goals—the result is an operational plan, which is designed to outline how a business will execute on its strategy. An effective operational plan considers the following key elements:
- Tasks, which are the specific, actionable items the team needs to accomplish,
- Timelines, which outline when tasks need to be done,
- Resources, such as people, tools, and budget, that need to be involved in the project,
- Responsibilities to match people to tasks, and
- Standards/Metrics, to both enable and measure the quality of work.
Think of the operational plan as your manual for successfully implementing projects—it shows you all the tools you have in your kit and how to get the best experience with the whole package.
Operational Planning vs Strategic Planning
It can be easy to confuse operational planning vs strategic planning, and while they are deeply interconnected, they are two distinct processes in these key areas:
1. Focus
Strategic planning outlines the rationale, the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of an organization, and it illustrates a high-level vision and why this matters to the larger business. Operational planning, on the other hand, deals more with the ‘how,’ ‘who,’ and ‘when,’ and goes into the specifics of executing on a vision, down to the day-to-day activities.
2. Scope
The strategic plan is more encompassing and involves the organization as a whole, whereas the operational plan is often developed at the team or department level. In this case, an operational plan’s focus falls within the scope of the business strategy, and the operational planning process will rely heavily on the quality of the strategic plan.
3. Time Frame
Strategic planning is considered a long-term effort, often outlining a vision that takes effect for at least 3-5 years (sometimes 5-10). Operational planning is much more narrow, often outlining plans for up to a year or less, broken down into months or quarters. By extension, a strategic plan is more static, while an operational plan is considered a living document and is more frequently updated to adapt to changing circumstances.
4. Responsibility
Strategy is often developed at the top level of management (think CEOs or your Board of Directors) while operational plans are typically made and maintained by middle management, such as your operations manager, department heads, or project leads. Top-level management is responsible for providing a general direction in this case, and the middle managers work directly with teams to ensure the day-to-day operations steer towards the established goals.
In the case of strategic planning vs operational planning, it’s important to remember that both are essential parts of your business, just in different ways.
Business planning can also often bleed into the debate of operational vs strategic planning, which is a fair question to ask considering the ways in which they overlap. Mainly, business planning is concerned with things like the products or services that a business offers, its target audience, and the intended business model—the goal here is to justify the business as a whole by illustrating why it has a place in the market. While this gives it more overlap with a strategic plan, all three ultimately are similar in their need for thorough goal-setting.
The Benefits of Operational Planning
Create a stair diagram illustrating the cascading benefits in ascending order:
- Clear communication
- Alignment on tasks, roles & responsibilities
- Efficient collaboration
- Increased accountability & engagement
- Higher quality
Operational planning is similar to any project management activity, in that it creates a cascading effect of benefits for your team, starting with:
- Alignment and clarity: The operational plan is a document, essentially a communications tool. When done right, it aligns teams on key details such as tasks, roles, and responsibilities, and how those fit into the bigger picture of a project.
- Efficiency: A clear distribution of work helps minimize (ideally, eliminate) any overlaps or redundancies in the project. It also streamlines the day-to-day communication, allowing for a smooth transition of work from one team member to another.
- Accountability and ownership: When team members are clear on how their roles impact the project, you clarify the value of their work and increase the overall sense of accountability to the project. This gives the team members a sense of purpose, which helps drive higher-quality output.
In this sense, an effective operational plan not only creates a snowball effect in productivity but also creates a cycle of clear and open communication within your team, which is a highly underrated aspect of why projects succeed. Ultimately, if your team can work together well, you can be more confident in the results.
A Guide to Building Your Operational Plan
A flowchart outlining the six steps below, in order:
- Determine strategy
- Break down tasks
- Assign roles
- Build timeline
- Implement and monitor
- Review & adjust
Steps 3-6 should be shown to connect back to all previous steps until step 2, to illustrate that adjustments can be made individually, without needing to go through the entire cycle again.
Now that we understand the operational plan's concept and importance, it’s time to create one for your team. The question is, how do you create one that works?
To do this, we’ve created a step-by-step guide you can follow to piece together its most important parts. Guide questions are also included as prompts to help you think about what to include.
1. Get clear on the strategy
Like we mentioned in the debate between strategic and operational planning, the operational plan relies heavily on the existence of a strategic plan. It’s important to align with your top-level stakeholders on the high-level goals, which will help inform more specific objectives depending on the team you’re working with or the project you are implementing. To do this, you will also want to get familiar with setting SMART goals for your operational plan—this is especially important when you remember that an operational plan needs to be actionable.
2. Break down tasks
Once you’ve determined a good set of goals, you can begin breaking them down into actionable tasks. The more detailed, the better—a good rule of thumb for breaking down tasks is that you want to define work that can be accomplished in one day. Later on, you will get the help of your team to figure out whether this is true.
At this stage, it’s good to ask:
- What preparations are needed?
- What tasks do we expect to work on?
- What supporting work might we expect to do on top of this project? Think documentation and meetings.
- How do we know this task has been completed to standard?
3. Assign roles & responsibilities
After you’ve broken down a list of tasks, it’s time to take a look at your team members and assign their roles and responsibilities. Critical to this is knowing their skills and their availability, as that will inform which tasks they are equipped to work on. Ask yourself:
- Which team members are available to work on these tasks?
- What tasks can this team member provide useful insight or expertise on?
- Does this team member have the necessary skills to work on this task?
At this point, it will be helpful for you to go back with your team and review the task list, to see if there is any work that you might have missed. Alternatively, if you know who is on your team beforehand, you may want to work with them on step #2 before working to assign specific tasks to each team member. This is important because their expertise provides perspective you might otherwise lack when breaking down tasks from high-level goals.
4. Build a timeline
Once you’ve delegated most or all tasks, it’s time to prioritize by assigning start and end dates for each task. This is where your team can further inform the quality of your task breakdown, as you will be working with them to estimate each task. Durations help inform dates, and the estimates will help flag any tasks that might need further breaking down. Your team can now also help with identifying any dependencies between tasks, which will further help with prioritization.
Some useful guide questions at this stage include:
- How long will it take to accomplish X task?
- What tasks make sense to do at the same time, if any?
- When should X task begin in order to keep dependent tasks on track?
- What tasks rely on the completion of other tasks to start?
- What tasks need to be broken down into smaller actions?
Familiarizing yourself with estimation techniques and capacity planning will be hugely helpful at this stage of the process, and again, consider reviewing your efforts in steps #2 and #3 to fine-tune the details of your operation. A Gantt chart is a common tool to use in this step.
5. Implement and monitor your work
The ‘how’ of your operational plan is further divided into two levels: how goals are achieved (i.e., your tasks) and how your team collaborates in achieving those goals. To maximize your team’s time and skills, it’s important to create an environment that enables their best work. This includes defining communication strategies, pipelines, conventions, and other standards that tell your team how work will be completed, and to the highest standard.
Guide questions here will include:
- Where can the team view their tasks and their progress?
- What communication channels does the team use?
- How are tasks handed over from one team member to another?
- Where are files stored, if any?
- What other tools do we use to collaborate?
From here, your team can begin work on the project, monitoring for any changes or roadblocks, as well as any notable trends in the efficiency and quality of work.
6. Review, adapt, and update as necessary
Over time, your monitoring activities will yield useful data for measuring performance. This is where the living part of the operational plan comes into play—by regularly reviewing your team’s progress, you can identify any issues with the existing plan:
- Is the team on track to deliver the necessary work on time?
- Are team members struggling with their workload? Why?
- What tools, skills, or knowledge might be lacking that’s affecting work quality?
- Are any processes interfering with the team’s productivity? How?
- Are there enough resources to keep the project on track?
While you can exert all levels of effort into building an effective operational plan, the day-to-day can present new challenges that can derail this. This doesn’t mean that the original plan failed; it simply operated on the information that was available at the time. This makes it important to continue monitoring the project for any changes, and adjusting parameters as necessary to stay on track.
In connection with step #6, it’s important to account for the need to redo steps 2-5 with your team as necessary. By being proactive about addressing roadblocks to your project, you ensure the greatest chance of success for your team.
Build and Execute Your Operational Plan with Workamajig
Operational planning in management requires you to juggle many moving parts, and it can become overwhelming as your business and projects grow in size and complexity. To keep up, robust management software will be helpful in keeping your day-to-day operations in order.
With Workamajig, the premier project management software, you have an all-in-one solution for plotting tasks, allocating work, and seamlessly transitioning into task and resource management. Adjust workloads with ease, 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 August 24, 2025.