Work Plans

A workplan is a schedule of the work needed on a media project. Before a project starts, you identify or estimate every task and activity and judge how long each one should take, then set them out in a plan that is followed right through to the deadline.

What a workplan holds

To build a workplan you need the duration of each task and activity, the overall timescale or final deadline, the order the work must be done in, the resources each task needs (people, hardware and software), and a contingency or back-up plan in case something slips.

A complete workplan covers all three phases: pre-production, production and post-production. A plan that stops once the main work is finished is incomplete, because reviewing and editing take time too and must be scheduled.

For example, a plan for a school podcast series might show planning and question writing in weeks 1–2, recording interviews in week 3, editing in week 4, and every episode published in time for the summer fair.

Why it is worth doing

• It manages time, tasks, activities and resources in one place, so nothing is forgotten.
• Everyone can see what is happening at any point in the project.
• An organised method everyone understands prevents clashes, such as two people needing the same camera or the same software at once.
• In a large team, members see their own role, when they are needed and which deadlines apply to them, so parallel work is coordinated.
• Someone working alone uses the plan to sequence their own work and pace themselves.

Using it as the project runs

A workplan is not written once and filed away. As the project goes on you compare what has actually been done against the plan, check that each stage has been reached on time, spot delays early and use the contingency to absorb them before the deadline is lost.

Tasks are the larger stages of a project: the major chunks of work that need finishing. Activities are the smaller parts that make up a task: the actual work done to complete that stage. Activities are sometimes called sub-tasks.

A task is not one small job. It is a larger stage made up of several activities. Each activity should sit under the task it helps to finish.

Breaking a project into tasks and activities makes it manageable. You can see every piece of work, schedule the activities, and allocate them to people. For example, in the video project, one person could be given the planning activities while another prepares to film. Without this breakdown, a large project can feel like one huge job, and smaller pieces of work are easier to forget.

A duration is how long one task or activity is expected to take. You give every piece of work a duration so the workplan shows how long each part of the project will take.

Durations turn a list of jobs into a schedule. Without them you would know what needs doing but not when it could finish or whether the deadline is realistic. Adding up durations shows how long a section of the project takes, and it helps you book the right people, hardware and software for the right amount of time.

For example, imagine a task to record a two-minute radio advert for a school charity. You allow 25 minutes to set up the microphone and check levels, 15 minutes to record and 20 minutes to save and label the audio files. The task duration is 60 minutes. If the recording needs a second voice, you would add that time too.

Durations must be realistic and based on the brief: a short social media clip will take less time than a full photo shoot. Good durations also make progress easier to monitor, because you can compare the time used so far with the time planned.

Workflow is the order or sequence in which the tasks and activities of a project are carried out. It sets out what happens first, next and last, so everyone knows how the work fits together.

A key part of a workflow is dependencies. A dependency is a link between two pieces of work: one cannot begin until the other is finished. For example, a Year 10 team is running a school book swap. The team must collect donated books before they sort them into genres, and they must sort the books before they arrange them on the shelves. Arranging therefore depends on sorting, and sorting depends on collecting.

Workflow is used to decide the order of work and to spot which tasks can run in parallel and which must wait. In the book swap example, designing posters to advertise the event can run at the same time as sorting the books, because no one is needed for both jobs. If the same person had to do both, the posters would have to wait until the sorting was finished. The workflow shows these waits and overlaps clearly.

Workflow is about order and links, not clock time. It tells you what must follow what, rather than how long each piece of work will take.

Resources are the people, hardware and software needed to carry out each task or activity in a project. Every task needs resources, even one that looks simple: writing a voiceover script needs a scriptwriter (a person) and a laptop with word-processing software (hardware and software).

In a workplan, each task is matched with the resources it needs, then those resources are allocated to it and checked to make sure they are free at that point in the schedule. Only then can you be confident the work will actually get done when you planned it.

Resources decide what can run at once

Two tasks can only happen at the same time when there are enough people and enough equipment or other resources for both. Imagine you are making a three-episode podcast for a school library.

Recording episode 1 and designing the cover art could happen at the same time, because they need different people and equipment — so there is enough of each for both. But if the same person were the sound recordist and the illustrator, those tasks would have to sit in different weeks. Tasks that need the same resources should not overlap, because one of them will be left waiting and the whole schedule slips. Checking availability also stops you double-booking the only camera or the only designer. Treating resources as equipment alone misses people and software: both can be just as scarce, and one person's time is often the tightest resource of all.

Milestones are the important moments that show a key stage of a project has been reached. They mark the point when a major piece of work is finished, such as a client approving a design or a final file being ready to publish.

A milestone takes no time itself. It is not an activity you schedule for an hour or a day; you reach it when the related tasks and activities are complete. For example, in a school podcast project, “all episode scripts approved by the teacher” is a milestone. Writing and reviewing the scripts take time, but the approval point is simply the checkpoint that shows that work is done.

Checkpoints for progress

Milestones act as checkpoints. They let you check whether key stages are complete and whether the project is on track. When a milestone is reached, the work leading up to it is finished. If that happens on the planned date, the project is on track; if it is missed, you can investigate what is late and take action before the final deadline.

Do not confuse a milestone with a task or activity: a task has a duration, while a milestone has zero duration.

Contingencies are extra time or a back-up plan added to a workplan in case something goes wrong or a task is delayed. They are a safety margin, not a job to tick off. For example, if you are making a podcast episode for a school open evening, you might aim to finish recording and editing early, then keep two days free as contingency before the publish date. If a guest is ill or a file will not export, those two days soak up the delay; if nothing goes wrong, you still publish on time.

Where contingency goes

You often build contingency in after a group of tasks has finished, before the final deadline. That way it sits between the work it protects and the date you must hit. In a photo gallery project for the school website, you could schedule the photoshoot, then selecting and editing images, then a contingency day, then upload and launch. The contingency day is not for starting a new task; it stays free so it can absorb a problem such as poor lighting forcing a reshoot. If you fill contingency with extra work, it is no longer available to absorb delays.

What it protects

A contingency protects the final deadline by giving the project room to recover. Delays in one part do not have to push everything later. A back-up plan does the same job in a different way: if the main camera fails, you use a spare; if a contributor cannot attend, you record a shorter alternative segment. Both extra time and back-up plans are contingencies because both help you cope with the unexpected and still finish on time.