16 Examples of Work Planning

John Spacey, updated on October 03, 2023

Work planning is the process of developing an action plan to deliver a set of requirements. This suggests a one time initiative of change that isn't repeated as with a business process. Work planning also suggests a lightweight process that is less than what you would do to plan a full project. The following are common examples of what can be included in work planning followed by a template.

Identify scope	Identify stakeholders
Work objectives	Gather requirements
Prioritize requirements	Create a task & activity list
Estimate effort, time & cost	Identify dependencies
Estimate resources	Work assignments
Work schedule	Work budget
Identify milestones	Identify risks
Quality control plan	Key success factors

Scope indicates what you will do as part of the work. This also carefully documents what is out of scope and all of your assumptions and constraints.

Not all of the examples above would be included in all work plans. The emphasis here is that some work doesn't require a full project. If you start adding more than is listed above, you are approaching the complexity of full project management.

Template

The following example can be used as a template for a work plan.

Work Plan

Work Description

Update the corporate website to reflect the new brand guidelines.

Stakeholders

Corporate communications
Brand marketing team

Work Objectives

Update all pages on the corporate site to reflect the new brand guidelines including compliance with logos, colors, fonts and language around the brand.

Out of Scope

This update will address static web resources such as html and images. Updates to dynamic web pages such as the ecommerce site are out of scope.

Work Tasks
Task	Description	Completion Date
Gap Analysis	Analysis of all pages on the corporate site to list non-compliances with the new brand guidelines.	July 15, 2030
Site Update	Using the gap analysis, all pages will be updated.	September 15, 2030
User Testing	The brand marketing and corporate communications team will manually view every page on site and confirm that they match the brand guidelines. Any defects will be fixed and retested.	October 15, 2030
Launch	The updated pages will be launched to production.	October 19, 2030