Making game plans
A game plan is a strategically chosen set of plays that you can run to achieve an outcome. They provide a guide for your team to follow, and help you to plan and scope projects. They provide some structural guidance with suggested methods and outputs.
If you don’t want to use a game plan, you don’t need to. The playbook is modular, so you can pick and choose activities that are relevant to your project or problem statement.
Why use a game plan?
Game plans can help you:
- plan tasks and track outcomes
- create team alignment towards a common goal, and get consensus on which tasks are required
- understand the big picture – including stakeholders, resources, requirements, and outcomes
- better estimate time and resources
- develop reasonable expectations as you write a request for a quote, or review a proposal
- feel more informed when speaking with designers or other stakeholders
When to create your game plan
It’s best to create a game plan when you’re planning your project – before you begin the discovery stage. But if you're already partway through a project, the best time to create a game plan is right now.
Tip – Using other design approaches
This playbook uses the service design and delivery process, but you can use plays and game plans with other frameworks too – for example, human centred design.
How to make a game plan
1. Think about your goals
Goals are what you need to accomplish
Defining your goals will help you identify useful plays. Remember – these are your goals for the stage, not the whole project. To define your goals, think about how the objectives of the stage relate to your project. For example, part of the Discovery stage is understanding user needs, so two of your goals might be:
- Determine who our users are.
- Gather information about our users to understand their needs.
2. Choose your plays
The plays are how you will accomplish your goals
Choose a set of plays that will help you reach your goals for the stage, and which fit the skills, people, and time you have available.
Choose as many or as few plays as you need.
Tip – Defining and measuring success
We recommend that you always include the defining success play in the discovery stage, and the measuring success play in the alpha, beta, and live stages.
Use these plays to determine how you’ll measure the impact of your work, to define what ‘success’ looks like, and to take baseline measurements at the start of the project.
3. Allocate roles and tasks
Determine who will be responsible for the key tasks needed for each play.
For example, workshops require a facilitator, interviews require an interviewer, and some plays require a scribe.
4. Define your timeline
Plan when you’ll run each play, or in which order.
Think about when you want to deliver certain outputs, when resources and people will be available, and whether certain plays have prerequisites – for example, you can’t run a design critique until you have designs to critique.
5. Plan the next stage
Start again at step 1 and make a separate game plan for each stage.
If you’re not certain which plays you’ll need to run in later stages, that’s fine – you can think of those game plans as guides. Game plans help to keep your project focused and keep your team aligned, even when they change.
You can update your game plans as you move through your project and get a better idea of which plays will fit best.