Now we want to define our actions and plans. Now we have a brainstorming session. But what type of brainstorming session could we have to be a shared document that people can edit like a Google Drive document. It could be a Google Hangout. So you could literally everybody involved in the project to sit down and do that. It could be a meeting with minutes.

Or it might be just you sitting there creating ideas. But make sure that everyone involved in the project is in the brainstorming session, because this is going to improve project by and if they're, they're contributing at the beginning with ideas. Then, when it comes to later on making sure that the project is carried through and fulfilled, they will have brought in to the project. Here's a brainstorming tip. There's no such thing as a bad idea when you go through the brainstorming process. It's not about choosing, it's about writing the ideas down no matter how crazy they might seem, and get them all down.

And what we're going to do is we're going to then go through the process of selecting what we're going to do, so that we can create our actions and our plans. In this session, we chose to focus on who could deliver a marketing increase, who could implement the changes needed to improve a newsletter signup rate. To do that, what we needed to do was go for a simple selection process, we needed to choose the top four to six ideas that are achievable. And we needed to use a grid analysis to choose that. So let's have a look at an example grid analysis and see how we differentiate the different ways of finding the right person to actually perform the project. So here's our grid analysis.

We used Some of the things we could do, we could hire an outside marketing consultant, we could hire a trainee, we could hire a social media marketing manager, we could train the tea boy, we could do it yourself. So what we needed to do was figure out a way of quantifying this. And obviously, this is not super scientific, but it's a really good way of giving you a general idea. Now you'll notice at the bottom, if you want to wait the grid, and remember this will be a resource in the course so and download the grid analysis. If you want to wait the grid, just take the fact that it's most important to increase the range to 10. So for you cost might be really sensitive, someone else it might be time, that's the thing that organizations struggles with the most, but you might want to say, one is a high time cost 10 is a low time cost.

And what that will do is that will give you a multiple choice pation on that particular factor, which will help with the multiple that we get out at the end. So for instance, here we have, we're going to multiply all of these together to get to the end. So we're going to hire an outside marketing consultant. So one times one times one is one times five is five. So it's got a high time cost. So that's a one.

It's got high labor cost as a one, the high financial cost, that's the one and it's a high, it's got a low failure risk. So that is a five. So we add all those up. And we we might come to five you might decide that these ratios are different pirate trainee, well, scans can take time and have a high labor cost. financial cost is not going to be as bad as the others because he's going to train a system on a lot of ways. We might get some Government funding, the now is a free high failure.

It's nice to he's a trainee he might not commit. But that brings us out a multiplied score of six. And we do the same, we could hire a social media marketing manager. Again, it's a high cost but not quite as high as a marketing consultant to bring in. So that gives us a multiplication of 10. We could train the tea boy, again, low cost financially high value risk, project risk, and we end up with a score of four, or you could do it yourself, the boss could do it.

But the project risk is high because he might get distracted with something else. But that's a 10. But when we go through and do this process, we can start to see that certain things actually start to weight themselves. When we apply our parameters, and remember each factor, you have to decide how important they are. And the more important ones give them a higher value than the other ones. Like we said, you'd increase the maybe the project risk is really important to you.

So you'd increase that from one to 10. Now a complex selection process would be, we would choose the top four to six ideas or achievable, we'd run a cost analysis, and we'd run a risk analysis. So we do a cost analysis, we'd look at labor costs, equipment, software costs, consultancy costs contingency fund, this would be a much more in depth process than the grid analysis, and we want to try and figure out an estimate this as much as possible. For a simple project, I would suggest a simple grid analysis, but if you're really, really going to do a complex project, and you need to know how much it costs, then you're definitely going to want to do a cost analysis. We're going to need to figure out what risks we've got. So questions we might ask, what risks are the projects itself?

What are the risks to the organization? What are the risks to employee morale if we adopt this approach. So for example, MailChimp delete your email list, that might be a risk. The boss gets too busy and doesn't follow through on the project that might be a high risk. So we can do a complex risk analysis, write all this down, and then create a report and use that. So the more complex the project, you might go for complex selection process.

But if it's a simple project, and the cost and the risks are not going to be that high, then you can use a simple grid analysis sheet. And now we're going to define our actions Plan, we're going to choose our action, the boss is going to take charge of this project. The project controls now need to be put in place. So we want to choose what project controls is going to be. So in this instance, we've chosen regular port reports, regular meetings in person or in Hangouts, task lists, and a Gantt chart, you need to choose your project manager who will monitor the controls. But in this instance, it's probably not wise to have the boss monitor his own controls.

You probably want someone who can monitor the boss and actually say, We're falling under. We're on time we're doing well. So now we've decided what our project controls are, we can move on to the next phase.