Step 5
Action Planning for Use of the Internet
Produce a plan for integrating the
Internet into your organization's work
In Step 1 (Awareness) and Step 2 (Assessment), you introduced the Internet to your colleagues
and analyzed how your organization receives and gives out information. In Step 3 (Finding Answers to Technical Questions) and Step 4 (Training), you explored the technical aspects of getting
Internet access and training colleagues on how to use the Internet. You have now had a
chance to try some of the Internet's most used and useful features, and you have gained
some sense of how these features can contribute to your mission.
Step 5 focuses on how the Internet can be used to accomplish
tasks important to your workplace—communicating with nearby or distant associates,
publicizing your organization, selling products and services, and conducting research,
among others. Simply purchasing the equipment and connecting to the Internet will not
bring about results. To take full advantage of this new tool, you need to develop a plan
to introduce it into your organization and devise concrete steps to apply it to achieving
your development objectives.
Overview: Developing an Internet Action Plan
The best action plans are written by the people who will
implement them. After all, they know their jobs, the work environment, and the constraints
under which they operate. They are in the best position to anticipate problems and
solutions encountered in doing something different.
You will need the good ideas and the support of your
co-workers, even though occasionally it may seem less time-consuming just to write the
plan yourself. Depending on your organization and your position in it, you will need the
support of your supervisor, your employees, or your board of directors. We suggest
involving your colleagues in a three-phase planning process:
1. Conduct a brainstorming or dreaming session that allows
people's imaginations to roam free. What would you do to reach your organization's goals
if there were no barriers to sharing information? How would you change your program? Exercise 4 gives you a
framework to facilitate this dreaming.
2. Then, return to reality, but with a sense of the
possibilities that the Internet can bring to your organization now or in the future.
Develop action goals for introducing the Internet into your work (Exercise 5).
3. Draft an action plan to achieve the goals. The action plan
will carry you beyond the dream phase of Internet access into the realm of practical use.
A well thought-out plan will detail the resources required, time frame, people
responsible, and evaluation procedures needed to accomplish your goals (Exercise 6).
Dreaming
Although you may be reluctant to spend time on a dreaming
session, it is worth your time. Why?
This session enables you and your colleagues to think of new
ways your organization could do business if the communication barriers it currently faces
were removed. How might your organization use the features of the Internet in an ideal
world?
What if you could send your newsletter to all its
readers—for free? What if you could instantly tell your entire board of directors
about a new policy development? What if you could instantly access the most up-to-date
information on any subject? How could your organization take advantage of these and other
things that could result from a world without communication barriers?
Dreaming will help you see how to use the Internet in
creative ways that further your organization's mission and goals. Do not make it a long
exercise—perhaps 30 or 60 minutes at most. Have fun!
When this exercise has been introduced in Leland Initiative
Training workshops, participants have found it very useful. Dreaming is an important phase
in planning how you can take advantage of this new tool. It allows you to think beyond the
way things are now and to imagine the way things could be.
Exercise 4: Dreaming about the
Way Things Could Be
Think about the Internet features you now know about, as well
as some of the features that you have not experienced firsthand but have heard about.
Take a few minutes and dream about what your organization
would do differently if all communication barriers were removed. Write your ideas on the
Dreaming worksheet, just as Tina and the other staff of HEALTHLINK 2000 did in the
following example.
| Dreaming |
HEALTHLINK 2000
(name of your organization or business)
What would you do to reach your organization's goals
if there were no barriers to giving and receiving information? How would your program
change?
Establish a regional network of experts on health
education that exchanges information and lessons learned on a regular basis.
Create a network of organizations that are involved in
nutrition, reproductive health, child health, etc.
Send our newsletter to many more people.
Share ideas and work more closely with experts all over
the world, including having them peer review articles that we want to submit to
international journals.
Develop an exchange program for people doing similar work
in other organizations allowing them to work with us for some time and vice versa.
Connect every village health center to the Internet in
order to conduct weekly online discussions where all participants can see each other and
give live demonstrations of health education techniques. |
(For a blank copy of this
worksheet, see appendix 12, Dreaming.)
Action Planning
Now you will bring together your organization's statement or
purpose and the information use analysis you generated in Step 2, the cost estimates you
calculated in Step 3, the worksheet in Step 4 about how specific Internet features can
help you do your job, and the Dreaming worksheet that you just worked on. Exercises 5 and
6 will take you through the process of using these resources to set goals and develop your
action plan. The chart on the next page shows how all these various steps come together in
the development of an effective action plan.
What Is an Action Plan?
An action plan specifically outlines how you intend to
achieve a goal or set of goals. A well thought out action plan can help organizations plan
ahead when implementing projects. It can help them get the resources they need and make
the necessary changes in the way they currently do things. Ideally, an action plan is
developed by the people who will be implementing it. It is approved by the people or body
that normally gives the final go-ahead to proceed with a project. This could be a board of
directors, a company president, a supervisor, or a group of peers in a team environment.
The information that an action plan contains is far more
important than the way it looks or the specific document format used to present it. Action
plans can be produced in many different formats. It is important for the people developing
the plan to choose a format that makes sense to them. The box on the following page shows
the basic elements of an action plan.
You may already have a procedure for developing an action
plan, and you may want to use it or a version of it that works best for you. Remember that
action plans can be used to look ahead at all kinds of things. In this case, though, we
are looking specifically at developing goals and determining how the Internet can help
achieve them.
One of the strengths of an action plan is that it helps you
think realistically about each of the "must have" elements. You cannot have a
complete action plan without thinking about how much a specific step will cost, how much
time it will take to accomplish, who will do it, and how you will know if you have
accomplished the task.
| USING THE EXERCISES TO DEVELOP YOUR
ACTION PLAN 
|
Another useful thing about an action plan is that you can
change it as work progresses, as your access to resources changes, or as other
circumstances of the project change. No action plan is set in stone—it is meant to be
a practical guide that reflects the current realities you are facing at a specific point
in time. So if you find that work is progressing more quickly than you originally thought
it would, or you are spending more money on a specific part of the project, you can modify
your action plan to reflect that change.
The West African
Enterprise Network, formed in 1993 to promote economic growth in West Africa,
developed three realistic, pragmatic goals related to the Internet: improve the
availability of trade information to its members, strengthen the capacity of its
information center, and increase its members' Internet connectivity. |
Exercise 5: Developing Action Goals
How can you use the Internet to help your organization
achieve its purpose? This exercise helps you set goals and decide on projects.
Now is the time for your dreams to meet reality. Take another
look at the Information Use Analysis you did in Step 2 and the
Dreaming worksheet that you just developed. Refer to your comments on the worksheet
entitled How Can the Internet Assist Us in Our Jobs?
Next, think of specific ideas from each of these worksheets
that you could realistically implement in your organization. Keeping in mind the resources
of your organization (as well as your ability to acquire additional resources, possibly by
combining efforts with another organization, creating grant projects, etc.), think of
several ideas that you would like to implement to bring you closer to your dreams. Use the
Action Goals worksheet to write several specific projects or action goals that you think
your organization could realistically accomplish and that would contribute to achieving
its overall mission.
The goals for HEALTHLINK 2000's action plan are on the
worksheet on the next page. In this example, HEALTHLINK 2000's goals correspond to the
steps outlined in this manual. The goals challenge the staff without creating impossible
expectations. The goals are small and realistic, but very important. They are also logical
in terms of where HEALTHLINK 2000 is now, and they contribute to the organization's
mission. Moreover, they create a solid foundation for expanded uses of the Internet in the
future.
| Action
Goals |
HEALTHLINK 2000
(name of your organization or business)
Goal 1. Introduce the Internet to the HEALTHLINK 2000
staff in a way that will help the staff plan creatively and realistically for using the
Internet in their work [corresponds to Step 1].
Goal 2. Get connected to the Internet and begin to use it
for HEALTHLINK 2000 work [corresponds to Steps 3 and 4].
Goal 3. Make HEALTHLINK 2000's quarterly newsletter
available electronically to regular readers who have access to the Internet [corresponds
to Step 6].
Goal 4. Reduce by half the amount of money spent on
international telephone calls and faxes by taking advantage of e-mail and Internet fax
services [corresponds to Step 6].
Goal 5. Determine the overall effectiveness of the other
goals of this action plan [corresponds to Step 7]. |
(For a blank copy of this
worksheet, see appendix 13, Action Goals.)
ELEMENTS OF AN
ACTION PLAN
GOAL 1
The overall goal of what you're trying to achieve.
Purpose
Why this goal is of value to your organization. This should
be closely related to the mission of your organization.
Action Step 1
- Resources required
- Time frame
- Responsible party
- Evaluation method: How will you know you have accomplished
this step?
Action Step 2
- Resources required
- Time frame
- Responsible party
- Evaluation method: How will you know you have accomplished
this step?
Action Step 3
GOAL 2, GOAL 3 (up to perhaps four or five goals in
total)
(There are usually several different goals in an action plan.
Each goal is developed using the same elements outlined above.) |
Exercise 6: Write Your Action Plan
Once you have established your goals and determined that they
are appropriate for your organization, you can begin to write your action plan. As your
organization's Internet champion, you are probably the person who will take responsibility
for gathering ideas and drafting the plan. By involving everyone in the organization and
incorporating their comments and feedback into the plan, you are most likely to get the
support and commitment necessary to succeed. Don't try to save time by avoiding discussion
about it with others—particularly the people who make the decisions about your budget
or oversee your program's activities. Although this internal review process takes time, it
will be worth it in the end.
Remember that an action plan does the following:
- Describes how you intend to achieve a goal or set of goals.
- Is developed by the people who will be implementing it.
- Can be in any format that makes sense to the people developing
and implementing it.
- Helps you to think realistically about a project.
- Can be revised as work progresses to accommodate changing
circumstances.
- Can help turn your dreams into reality.
| Action
Plan |
| HEALTHLINK 2000
(name of your organization or business)
Goal 1:
To introduce the Internet to the HEALTHLINK 2000 staff in a
way that will help the staff plan creatively and realistically for the use of the Internet
[Step 1: Internet awareness].
Purpose:
The purpose of this goal is to enhance HEALTHLINK 2000's
ability to communicate information about its programs and services to its target audience,
colleagues, and funding sources and to allow HEALTHLINK 2000 to take full advantage of
trends and research in community-based health education and information resources
available on the the global Internet.
Action Step 1:
Give a presentation about the Internet to the staff to make
sure that they all know what it is and some of the ways that it is currently being used,
as well as how they might use the Internet to enhance their work. This could be done in a
half-day presentation. The main resource required here is Tina's time in planning and
facilitating the session. It would be nice, though not essential, to enlist the help of a
local ISP or another organization that has a connection to the Internet for a live
demonstration.
Resources Required:
Staff time
Time Required:
Three and one half days staff time to prepare, half day to
deliver the training
Responsible Party:
Tina
Evaluation:
(See under Step 2 below.)
Action Step 2:
Get specific ideas from the staff on how they could use the
Internet in their work, as well as any problems and concerns that they can foresee in
using it. Once staff are aware of what the Internet is, we could have another group
session to get ideas on how we could use the Internet in our work.
Resources Required:
Staff time
Time Required:
Three hours, plus two hours afterwards for an informal survey
of staff needs.
Responsible Party:
Tina
Evaluation:
These two action steps can be evaluated together by answering
these questions:
• Do HEALTHLINK 2000 staff have a basic understanding of
how they might be able to use the Internet and how it could affect their work?
• Do we now have some specific ideas on how HEALTHLINK
2000 can use the Internet and what specific difficulties we need to be aware of when we
get connected?
Goal 2:
To get connected to the Internet and begin to use it for
HEALTHLINK 2000 work [Steps 3 and 4: Internet technical answers and training].
Purpose:
To establish the process that HEALTHLINK 2000 will use to
connect to the Internet.
Action Step 1:
Get an Internet connection. Review worksheet Planning for
Connectivity. Purchase equipment and services that are still needed to get connected (a
modem and an Internet access account from an ISP). Tina will purchase the modem and
arrange for help installing the software on the computer.
Resources Required:
Tina's time and funds to purchase the modem and Internet
access service.
Time Frame:
Two weeks to get the modem and activate the account.
Responsible Party:
Tina will purchase the modem and arrange for help installing
the software on the computer.
Evaluation:
This step will be completed when one HEALTHLINK 2000 staff
member (Tina) can successfully call up a Web page, send and receive e-mail, visit a telnet
host, and use FTP to send and receive documents.
Action Step 2:
Train HEALTHLINK 2000 staff in basic Internet tools and
functions. Tina will do most of the training, and she will ask people from the local ISP,
as well as other organizations, to come in to give presentations on specific parts. Since
not all HEALTHLINK 2000 staff are completely comfortable using the computer, some of them
will also need basic computer training before they can participate in the technical
training. Because they have only one computer and one phone line, they anticipate that the
training will be mostly one-on-one, and it will only be for about an hour each day, since
all staff members have other work to do.
Resources Required:
Staff time.
Time Required:
Three to four weeks to plan the training and arrange for
outside help and then another three to four weeks to conduct the training. Training will
be an ongoing process.
Responsible Party:
Tina will be the main trainer for the organization, although
other staff may help once they are trained.
Evaluation:
This step will be considered successful when:
• Each staff person can successfully log onto the
Internet through the local ISP, go to a specific Web page, and use a search engine to find
information on the Web.
• The person designated to get the e-mail for the office
can log in and retrieve the organization's e-mail.
• Tina feels comfortable training staff to use the World
Wide Web.
Goal 3:
Make HEALTHLINK 2000's quarterly newsletter available
electronically to regular readers with access to the Internet [Step 6: Implementation].
Purpose:
This will allow HEALTHLINK 2000 to distribute its newsletter
to more people without any additional cost and eventually to reduce by half the cost of
printing and distributing the hard copy of the newsletter.
Action Step 1:
Research the best (and lowest cost) way to distribute the
newsletter electronically. Can we use our ISP's FTP server or gopher site? Would the
national university or another health organization be willing to host a distribution list?
In what computer format should we distribute an online newsletter? Should we consider
setting up our own Web site, hosted through the local ISP?
Resources Required:
Staff time (newsletter staff, with assistance from Tina).
Time Frame:
Three days to perform research (on the Internet) and make
contacts at local university (through e-mail).
Responsible Party:
Newsletter editor.
Evaluation:
This step will be considered successful when HEALTHLINK 2000
has enough information to make decisions regarding the best way to proceed with production
of the electronic newsletter.
Action Step 2:
Compile a list of e-mail addresses of our regular newsletter
readers.
Resources Required:
Staff time.
Time Required:
Total three days and ongoing as staff discover additional
addresses.
Responsible Party:
HEALTHLINK 2000 circulation manager.
Evaluation:
This step will be considered successful when 500 good e-mail
addresses of newsletter readers (half of the normal distribution of 1,000) are compiled.
Action Step 3:
Plan changes to the newsletter and the production schedule to
reflect new electronic edition distribution.
Resources Required:
Staff time of newsletter staff.
Time Frame:
One week, intermittent staff time.
Responsible Party:
Newsletter editor.
Evaluation:
This step will be considered successful when HEALTHLINK 2000
has a specific plan for publishing the electronic newsletter and knows approximately how
many readers will no longer require the hard copy newsletter.
Goal 4
Reduce by half the amount of money spent on international
telephone calls and faxes by taking advantage of e-mail and Internet fax services [Step 6:
Implementation].
Purpose
HEALTHLINK 2000 spends a lot of money each month on local and
international telephone calls and faxes that are necessary to its work. By substituting
e-mail for as many long distance phone calls as possible and by using an Internet fax
service, we could reduce the amount spent on telecommunications.
Action Step 1
Add e-mail addresses to the regular contact information kept
on each colleague, business associate, or organization that we communicate with.
Resources Required:
Staff time: Each staff person is responsible for collecting
e-mail addresses of the people with whom he or she communicates.
Time Frame:
Ongoing.
Responsible Party:
HEALTHLINK 2000 program assistant.
Evaluation:
This step will be considered successful when each person
sends e-mail more frequently than he or she makes toll-charge telephone calls.
Action Step 2
Research and subscribe to an Internet fax service.
Resources Required:
Staff time, possibly an initial deposit and ongoing payments.
Time Frame:
Expect to be subscribed within one week.
Responsible Party:
HEALTHLINK 2000 business manager.
Evaluation:
This step will be considered successful when the number of
toll-charge faxes originating from the HEALTHLINK 2000 office is reduced by 50 percent.
Goal 5:
To determine the overall effectiveness and value to
HEALTHLINK 2000 of the other goals of this action plan [Step 7: Reviewing and Looking
Ahead]. Questions to be answered include: Were the individual goals successful? What
worked well and what went poorly? How could the activities in each goal have been
improved? Should they be continued? What, if any, additional information communication
goals should be planned? What other ideas for using Internet technology should HEALTHLINK
2000 consider?
Purpose:
To evaluate the overall effectiveness of HEALTHLINK 2000's
Internet-related activities in order to learn from the experience.
Action Step 1:
Decide on evaluation criteria (i.e., questions that need to
be answered and how they will be measured).
Resources Required:
Staff time, possibly some assistance from someone in another
local organization experienced in evaluation.
Time Frame:
Approximately two days total time.
Responsible Party:
HEALTHLINK 2000's evaluation team (to be decided on by
consensus of HEALTHLINK 2000 officers, staff, and board of directors.
Evaluation:
This step will be considered successful when HEALTHLINK 2000
officers, staff, and board of directors agree that the criteria and their measurement will
yield meaningful information.
Action Step 2:
Conduct an evaluation and present findings and
recommendations.
Resources Required:
Time of evaluation team members and the people responsible
for other goals.
Time Frame:
Ongoing throughout the implementation of the individual
goals.
Responsible Party:
HEALTHLINK 2000 evaluation team.
Evaluation:
This step will be considered successful when the evaluation
process and the report of the evaluation team:
• Provide input to improve future projects.
• Provide input into developing ideas, goals, and
techniques for implementing future information communication projects that contribute to
HEALTHLINK 2000's overall goals.
|
(For a blank copy of this
worksheet, see appendix 14, Action Plan.)
Are You Ready for the Next Step?
It is time for implementation! Recognizing that an action
plan is flexible and should be revised over time, do you and your colleagues feel
comfortable with the goals you have set and the steps to achieve them? Has everyone
needing to review the plan done so? Have you established goals that are within your means
at this time? If you have answered yes to these questions, you are ready to carry out your
plan. In Step 6 you will read about HEALTHLINK 2000's implementation (it was not
completely problem-free!) and get some suggestions for how to make the action plan you
developed a useful, working tool.
Step 4 | Table of Contents | Step 6 |