In a company or an administration, management committees are called SteerCos. These regular meetings are attended by the company’s directors, accompanied by a company secretary, a human resources manager, division heads and department managers. In any case, this management team has important responsibilities within the company.
The action plan at the heart of the steering committee
Whatever your position, you need to work on developing a sample action plan, using the right resources and paying attention to the context in order to achieve your goals and get satisfactory results.
Indeed, in every company, you have goals to reach, figures to achieve or projects to carry out. The decisions you make will be crucial and will determine the next steps and directions to take. These elements are essential for the survival and growth of your business. These priorities are given to the leaders and their team of direct reports, who will then take the time to organize themselves internally, within their departments, to achieve the objectives.
So, whether you are a junior consultant, a purchasing manager or an HR manager, you need to draw up a example of an action plan which will allow you to follow your current, past or future actions. Wondering how to make an action plan? Do you want to understand the principles? Read on!
The advantage of the action plan
As you will have understood, the stakes of the action plan in SteerCo are essential. Indeed, the objectives to be achieved, the deadlines, the means or resources, the services concerned, but also the level of difficulty are listed. Thanks to a retroplanning tool, you can also visualize in a few moments the priorities classified by order of importance. This way, your teams will be able to work in the order in which the objectives are to be achieved, without losing time.
Through a practical, functional, organized and easy to use chart, the SteerCo will benefit from a simple and quickly indispensable method for the success of the steps. All actors must be mobilized in this project. This single chart is an essential tool, a clear framework that will continue over the years. At a glance, management will be able to understand the status of ongoing files. This table is a real management tool for the stages and allows you to closely follow the stages, the work of the actors and the responsibilities of all.
Structured, regular, a SteerCo will have an agenda that will be established in advance. In this way, the employees concerned by this management committee will be able to anticipate questions, raise issues and present their cases. The main thing is to restrict the presence of employees at the SteerCo, in order to bring together only the professionals concerned by this meeting and thus integrate the main subjects. Thematic steering committees may be held with invited or external members. In this case, these elements will be specified in the agenda in order to better understand the context of the meeting. Don’t know where to start? Don’t know how to make an action plan? Follow our sound and wise advice!
A tool to manage your action plans?
Example of an action plan
You are probably asking yourself how to make an action plan ? Simple, effective, a table via a word processor or from a specific software will be very useful. This tool, once defined, will be used throughout the year and can be updated at each SteerCo. This table, which groups together the company’s principles, will have to define a method that will be decided by the management committee. We have compiled a summary of the essential elements for this action plan:
- indicate the date of the SteerCo
- specify the list of participants, excused and absent
- redo the agenda at the top of the statement of conclusions;
- write a clear and precise title for each action;
- prioritize the actions by numbering them and possibly make groups if it is the same subject;
- mention the services concerned, the actors who must act, the subcontracted services, the functions of each;
- mention the deadlines and extreme dates, the possible postponement of results;
- specify the means to be put in place ;
- indicate the internal and external resources of the company;
- detail the steps and provide a column for arguing and identifying the issues;
- recall the objectives, priorities and strategies.
This monitoring table allows you to see the success of a step, the achievement of an objective. Working in small groups helps to focus expectations and define strategy. This way, you will be able to follow each predefined step more easily and have the details of a possible delay in process development. Deposited securely on a server, managed collectively or not, this table can be edited or projected in SteerCo.
After this steering committee meeting, a record of conclusions will be drawn up by a meeting secretary in order to keep a record of the discussions, the decisions taken and the questions raised. These minutes, which are attached to the action plan and validated by management, will be distributed in a restricted or extended manner, depending on the level of confidentiality. Indeed, in the case of a company merger, the purchase of expensive raw materials or other sensitive issues, the SteerCo minutes should not be sent by e-mail to all employees but to a restricted selection.
