What are the benefits of weekly work plans?
A weekly work plan is very similar to a weekly project sprint that’s used in large companies, especially in the tech field. As the project manager, it’s your job to map out the weekly work plan so that you can:
Set priorities for the most important weekly tasks in a project
Help manage your team’s time to achieve the weekly targets
Reduce stress while improving worker focus and concentration
A weekly work plan sets the agenda for the week, allowing your team members to prioritize their work schedules around the master plan. By building a weekly work plan, your team members will:
Easily understand their weekly task expectations
Create weekly schedules that prioritize critical tasks
Feel more accomplished and satisfied with their weekly accomplishments
Weekly work plans are valuable resources that create weekly planning for teams and organize project deliverables. Using these task management tools, you can assign task resources and manage expectations in any given week. Creating consistent weekly work plans helps your team chip away at each milestone in a large project until you achieve the final project outcome.
When to use the weekly work plan template?
The weekly work plan template creates a visual overview of the entire week’s task deliverables by:
Turning weekly priorities into daily work schedules
Organizing individual work calendars into task priorities
Coordinating task completion time around stakeholder meetings
Creating more balanced workflows that reduce stress and improve focus
Imagine if you work for a small to mid-sized company, and your superiors have asked that all company data be transitioned into digital cloud infrastructures. The weekly work plan template will help you structure and organize that project, tracking all weekly tasks as your team implements the changes that modernize your business.
The weekly work plan template makes these planning sessions much easier to conduct. The template provides a visual overview of all priorities, allowing everyone on the team to visualize what needs to get done, by what deadline, and how many resources will be required to do so. The weekly work plan template makes your team more focused, more efficient, and more accountable to the weekly needs of your larger project.
The weekly work plan template organizes your weekly work schedule into daily targets and deliverables. By breaking down your weekly priorities into daily sections, you help your team members manage their work calendars so that the most important priorities are accomplished by the pre-selected deadlines.
Step 1: Organize your weekly schedule into daily sections
Begin by creating five vertical sections in your template, one for each day of the week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
This will organize the template very similarly to a weekly work calendar. Within each section, you can list out the tasks that must be completed throughout the week. It creates a visual overview of the weekly work schedule so that you can assign tasks in a workflow that makes the most sense for the team.
Step 2: Break down the weekly work schedule into daily tasks
Now you’re ready to break down the weekly deliverables into daily tasks. You can create a new Task by clicking the + in any section of your project board. Be sure to add a detailed description of the expectations and assign a tag so that the assignee understands the task scope.
Remember that each section on your project board represents one day of the workweek. It only makes logical sense to schedule tasks that are dependent on other tasks being completed later in the week. Keep certain task dependencies in mind as you list out all the weekly work schedule requirements. This will help with setting priorities and helping team members manage their schedules in the most efficient manner.
Step 3: Create checklists for each of your tasks
Every task will have a series of smaller sub-tasks that are part of the task completion sequence. On your project board, create checklists for each one of your tasks and assign those checklists to the team member responsible for completing the task. This will help the assigned team member manage the workflow so that the entire scope of the task is completed on time.
Checklists are particularly helpful if other tasks in the weekly work plan are dependent on the completion of the initial tasks. This will ensure all requirements for individual tasks are completed, ensuring tasks that begin later in the weekly work plan can proceed without any issues.
Step 4: Create your weekly workflow timeline
One of the best features of the weekly work plan template is the built-in project timeline feature. This feature resembles a Gantt chart and allows you to schedule all the tasks you’ve listed on your project board in a visual sequence throughout the week.
You can drag each of your tasks from your project board onto the project timeline and build your visualized weekly work plan. Once you drop a task onto the project timeline, click and drag the task horizontally to assign the appropriate start and end dates. This will create a visual overview of all tasks and project dependencies, creating a more complete picture of the project timeline.
Step 5: Monitor status updates and task dependencies
As tasks throughout the weekly work plan are completed, you can monitor task completion milestones and team performance with your template. Use the Reports feature of your weekly work plan template to generate daily status updates. You can monitor how team members are performing and if tasks are being completed by the scheduled deadlines.
If you have tasks that are dependent on earlier tasks being completed, these status updates help you verify the weekly work plan schedule. If necessary, you can then make any changes to your plan and modify the weekly work schedule.
