Brown paper planning

Development directorate

Brown paper planning

Spring 2007
developing people, improving young lives

Notes

Brown paper planning
What is it? • • • A brown paper technique which uses thepower of the team to plan a change implementation while building team ownership of the output It documents an entire implementation – capturing roles, a timeline and activities shown in “swim lanes”It highlights all milestones, activities, interfaces, decision points and deliverables During the Develop stage, prior to Delivery Don’t plan alone – always use the team by assigning responsibilityamong team members for each swim lane in the plan Start with milestones – working back from right to left with the final deliverable first, then the subsidiary key milestone events/deliverables

Whenwould you use it? • • • Are there any rules?

2

Notes For this tool you will need a large brown paper (hence ‘Brown Paper planning’); lots of post-it notes and flipchart marker pens. The ideais to engage your change team together in planning all the things that need to be done in order to implement a change initiative. You already will have a vision of what the future will be like andwill have progressed through Discovery and Deepen stages using some of the other Remodelling tools and techniques to arrive at a solution at the Develop stage. Now it is time to plan how you willdeliver the change and this brown paper tool helps to build ownership of key people in the execution of that plan.

Brown paper planning – starting point
Jan Design the four workshops Feb Mar Apr MayJune July

Timeline
Aug Sep

Workshop delivery Workshop outputs & forward planning

Workstreams
3

‘Swim lanes’

Notes Start with a large brown paper – about 2 metres high and perhaps 4metres long. Mark out the paper as shown above. There are three things to bear in mind: workstreams; ‘swim-lanes’; and a timeline. The team will first need to identify a number of ‘workstreams’. For...