Execute the Plan

Implement strategies and encourage adoption

Congratulations! You’re ready to execute against your plan and deliver the programs and services you’ve designed to transform your community. In other words, it’s time to make the vision you and your colleagues have worked on over these last few months a reality. The predominant characteristic of this stage in your community’s project is action. You’ve worked through goal setting, visioning, and planning and your efforts are now culminating in execution.

If you haven’t done so already, assigning a project manager would be beneficial to your efforts at this point. With so many aspects of the plan in motion, it’s helpful to have a team member dedicated to keeping your initiative running smoothly. Your project manager can also handle concerns and changes, implementing necessary adaptations in execution as they arise. Because your project may have, among other things, multiple participants and/or vendors, geographical or landscape challenges, and a large IT component, “on the fly” issues are not uncommon. Your project manager should be empowered to work with team members to solve these issues as they arise and keep the project moving on track and on time.

There are two additional components that your project should address at or immediately preceding this execution activity:

• Marketing & communications plan— No matter how critical the series or solutions you plan to deliver to your community and no matter how innovative your project’s vision or technology, success will ultimately be illusive if the audience you are targeting doesn’t know about your project and doesn’t have a clear understanding of its value. Budgeting, planning, and executing against marketing and communications geared towards your anticipated end-users is another critical component of successfully connecting your community. 
• End-user training—another critical but often overlooked component necessary to successfully connect your community is initial and ongoing end-user training. Budgeting, planning, and executing against training activity are necessary to drive end-user adoption. Put simply, if you want your target audience to use the network you’ve established and the applications you’ve built with them in mind, it’s useful to show them how to do so and to educate them about what they might gain from doing so.

Once all of these project components are successfully executed, you are ready for program launch!

Next Step: Evolve Your Initiative