The POAP – What’s to Become of the Plan on a Page

A plastic surgeon is asked if he’s ever been requested to do anything unusual.

“No”  he replies, “But I have raised a few eyebrows!”

Well when it come to being asked to developing a Plan on a Page, I’ve seen many an eyebrow raised.

So many different styles, shapes, colours, sizes, with and without text, with dependencies and without – depending on what organisation you work in.

I’ve even see some POAP’s that go to 2 or 3 pages – Doh!

The concept of the POAP is to provide a means of summarising a project plan for your stakeholders in a graphical and logical manner, in order to communicate the progress of the project. It is supposed to be simple but informative.  It is not supposed to be a substitute for a detailed Microsoft Project plan, which seems to be a global spreading malaise.

So isn’t it time to agree an industry standard POAP?

• One which has a view of the overall project timeline – or stage timeline.
• One which is meaningfully summarised
• One which is maintainable (most use Microsoft Powerpoint, Excel or Visio)
• One which is capable of displaying the percentage complete of each task
• One which includes meaningful RAG status icons.

So going back to our earlier cosmetic surgeon –

Maybe we could all do with a POAP facelift!

Malcolm McNeill is a freelance Financial Services Project Manager as well as CEO of Fabbydoo.com. Additionally he owns car rental comparison website BestCarHire and Motor Home comparison website HolidayCampervan.