Countdown to Completing Your Plan

We’ve compiled some milestones, tips and recommendations to help you complete and submit your unit’s plan successfully on April 3rd.

December/January

Orientation

The Business Relationship Management Team will set up orientation meetings for you and your co-authors. In these sessions, we will walk through the planning sheet, the template, the process, and key dates, and clarification on which efforts to include, update, or add.

Prioritize and select content, delegate, begin writing

Meet with your stakeholders to review and prioritize the list of IT efforts you are considering for inclusion in the plan. For tips on which projects and initiatives to include, check out the FAQ.
Once you have finalized your list of IT efforts, map each one to the list of IT Strategic Areas. For now, choose one primary strategic area for each effort. This will form your basic outline. This planning worksheet may be a useful tool at this phase. (Be sure to make a copy of the worksheet for your unit's use).
Divide and conquer! Assign different strategic areas to different authors, if possible.
Set a due date for first draft content to be in the Google doc.
Determine who should review content for each strategic area.

Tip: As you begin to write, we recommend you enter content directly into your Google Doc template right from the start. This will save time down the road and ensure nothing gets omitted by mistake when transferring information to the template. Remember, no one can see the content except you, the people you directly share it with, and the CITP project team.

January

Week of Jan. 27

Review your GoogleDoc and decide what to delete and keep from last year.
Make a list of new efforts to add in the planning worksheet.
Here's a planning worksheet you can use/copy to delegate writing assignments and assign due dates (we recommend Mar. 13)
Determine the stakeholder(s) in your organization that will need to review the plan.
Write!

February

Week of Feb. 10

Check on your co-authors' progress and remind them of their assigned due date.
Finish writing or editing IT efforts.
Start the review process.
- Share the GoogleDoc with your reviewers and give them a due date (we recommend Mar. 6)
- Don't wait until the complete plan is written, instead tackle it by effort.

Week of Feb. 24

Edit your "Organizational Information" content.
Check on review progress and remind reviewers of their assigned due date.
Incorporate initial reviewer feedback.
Update, write, or delete optional "Strategic Area narratives".

March

Week of Mar. 9

Make sure all reviews are complete.
Finish incorporating reviewer feedback.
Update any remaining details such as organization contact information, project contact information, URLs, and keywords.

Week of Mar. 23

Finalize your draft.
- Accept changes, resolve comments, do a final read-through and edit.
Complete the 2019 progress update (optional, located near the top of the template).
Next Friday is the big day!
- When ready, send an email to John Lugo (johnlugo@stanford.edu) or post an update in the Slack channel that your plan is complete.

April

Apr. 3: Due Date!

All plan content is due. You will now work with your assigned Business Relationship Manager to iterate and refine your plan.