Document Code FM-STL-013

Saint Louis University Revision No. 01

School of Teacher Education and Liberal Arts Effectivity June 07, 2021
Page 1 of 7

EXPLORE

PROJECT PLANNING, IMPLEMENTATION, SUPERVISION

AND MONITORING
A. PROJECT PLANNING
It is a plan that you create to successfully move your project plan into action. This
document identifies your goals and objectives (both short and long-term), lists the project
tasks, defines roles and responsibilities, outlines the budget and necessary resources, and
lists any assumptions. Project planning sometimes includes a rough schedule, but teams
usually set the hard timeline in the execution plan.

Components of Project Planning

The following are the key components of and questions that drive a successful
plan:
• Define Goals/Objectives: What do you want to accomplish? The scope of these goals will
depend on the size of your undertaking.
• Schedule Milestones: While task deadlines and project timelines will be formally set in the
execution plan, it’s a good idea to outline your schedule in the implementation phase.
• Allocate Resources: One of the core purposes of an implementation plan is to ensure that
you have adequate resources (time, money, and personnel) to successfully execute. So,
gather all the data and information you need to determine whether or not you have
sufficient resources, and decide how you will procure what’s missing.
• Designate Team Member Responsibilities: Assign roles. This doesn’t necessarily mean you
must define who will execute each individual task, but you should create a general team
plan with overall roles that each team member will play.
• Define Metrics for Success: How will you determine whether or not you are successful?
What data (whether quantitative or qualitative) will you use to measure your results, and
how will you accrue the necessary data?
• Define How You Will Adapt: Make a plan for how you will adapt, if necessary, to changes
in your plan. Be sure to consider factors outside your control that could significantly alter
the schedule or success of your project, and create emergent strategies ahead of time, so
you don’t get derailed down the road — doing so helps build a culture of flexibility, agility,
and fast action.
• Evaluate Success: In addition to defining your metrics for success, decide how often you
will evaluate your progress (e.g., quarterly reviews).

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 Document Code FM-STL-013
Saint Louis University Revision No. 01
School of Teacher Education and Liberal Arts Effectivity June 07, 2021
Page 2 of 7

Planning Best Practices

Although you should include all the detailed aspects listed above in your planning,
simply having all these components will not ensure success. Instead, you should focus on
the process of implementation and foster the following behaviors within you or your team:
(You can always make this best practice personal if you’re alone in planning a project)
• Create a Designated Implementation Team: An implementation team is the team
responsible for ensuring successful implementation of a particular initiative. While it’s
possible to move through implementation without creating a specific, organized body to
oversee the processes, doing so heightens your chances of success.
• Create a Shared Vision among All Team Members: Establish “why” you are making
strategic changes so that team members have both a greater understanding of the root
cause and a deeper connection to their work. Ensure individual compliance, so people
don’t feel like their voices went unheard. It is important to involve people who will actually
be implementing the change during the planning phase. Ideally, the idea will even come
from them. This inclusion greatly increases the buy-in and commitment that the team has
to actually getting the project implemented.
• Choose a Strong Team Leader: The team leader should coach and educate team
members along the way and seek out guidance from past implementation plan leaders
to improve upon existing implementation processes within the organization. The team
includes a ’champion,’ someone who is ultimately responsible for getting the thing done.
They should also have a ’management sponsor,’ someone that can help the team get
through any blocks they might have.
• Define Actionable Goals: Stay specific, define current issues, and identify root causes.
Methods for defining current problems include brainstorming, surveys, and new member
information forms. You can also use the note card method: Ask each team member to
answer three questions anonymously (What is the single biggest issue facing our team?,
What will be the most important issue in five years?, What is the best way for our team to
be involved in these issues?), separate the cards into piles with similar answers, and count
which answers are the most common within the group. Use the highest ranking similar
answers to stimulate discussion of how to proceed.
• Create an Action-Oriented Plan: Regardless of the size or predicted duration of your goals,
create a plan focused on incremental action (rather than on continual planning). Small
steps add up, so stay positive and focus on the future. Your plan must be realistic: “Make
sure your plan a reality-based” . You need to know what problem you really should be
solving so that you don’t end up solving proxy problems (problems you think are your
problem but really aren’t — an example of this is praying for rain when your real problem
is that you need water on your field). You need to know what is really going to impact your
problem so that you don’t pray for rain, which doesn’t affect anything. And, finally, you
need to know what you really need to do to get the work done. What resources do you
need? Do you have the resources you need? Can you get the resources you need? If not,
your plan won’t work.
• Value Communication: Your team leader should not only value others’ input, but also
make active participation an expectation. Open, honest communication keeps processes
transparent and helps generate new ideas.

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 Document Code FM-STL-013
Saint Louis University Revision No. 01
School of Teacher Education and Liberal Arts Effectivity June 07, 2021
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• Continually Monitor Incremental Success: Perform analysis and hold regular progress
meetings to analyze your development. Closely monitoring your progress enables you to
make adjustments before crisis hits and allows you to adapt before processes or
expectations become solidified. Additionally, treating incremental milestones as successes
helps foster a culture where employees feel valued for their contributions. Building a culture
where expectations about the projects will be successfully implemented is important.
• Involve the Correct People at the Correct Times: This includes defining when and why it is
appropriate to involve upper management. Include the critical stakeholders that are part
of the project. The beginning of planning should only include the decision makers and not
every team member that is part of the project. Outline the critical tasks that are needed
first. Once the tasks are outlined, dictate the personnel who will be responsible for the tasks.
Once you identify the personnel, then bring in the additional resources to find what other
tasks are needed to complete the larger tasks. To draft a proper implementation plan, it is
imperative to include the critical stakeholders to outline the initiative.
• Publicize Your Plan: While you don’t necessarily want every stakeholder’s input at all times
during implementation planning, you do want to maintain transparency with other teams
and management. Make your plan available to higher-ups to keep your team
accountable down the line.

Difficulties in Implementation Planning

While planning is critical to successful execution, there are several hurdles:

• Unless you are disciplined about moving into the execution phase, you can get stuck in
planning and never get your project off the ground.
• In any project, you may struggle to gain buy-in from key stakeholders.
• It can also be difficult to break down every goal into an actionable step. If you keep your
goals tangible, you can more easily identify targeted actions that will move you toward
them.
• No matter how well you plan, all projects have a high propensity for failure. Don’t get
discouraged, though — dedicated, strategic implementation planning will raise the
likelihood of project success.
Although the above hurdles can be time-consuming and tedious, they are
investments that will help you create a culture of trust. Because implementation is an
ongoing team effort, you can’t afford to lack buy-in and commitment from any member
of your team or direct stakeholders. So, communicate often and honestly, and prioritize
teamwork when implementing your strategic plan.
Still, even though inclusion and teamwork are key to a successful strategy,
implementation planning won’t work if too many people are involved. Implementation
planning often gets derailed due to the input from various people that are not involved
in the project. There is a need to draw a clear line between the implementation team
who is responsible for the execution and final project completion and the customers,
internal or external, who are the recipients of the project. The customers can outline their
requirements, but the implementation, tasks, and deliverables should be guided by the
implementation team.
Another common mistake is taking on too much at once. It takes a lot of work to
get something significantly new implemented. For this reason, the fewer initiatives that

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 Document Code FM-STL-013
Saint Louis University Revision No. 01
School of Teacher Education and Liberal Arts Effectivity June 07, 2021
Page 4 of 7

you take on simultaneously, the greater the chances of success. Each initiative will take
your team members away from your 'normal' work to some degree, and you need to be
able to support all of this. If there are six things that you want to implement, it is better to
take on one or two at a time than to try to tackle all six at once.

Figure: Project Planning

Service Learning Program (SLP)

• SLP enables in putting thoughts and ideas into paper for consideration for research.
• It is from the concept paper that one develops the research proposal which can either be
business or academic oriented.
• The SLP aim is to capture the thoughts and ideas while the research proposal captures the
ideas in a structured manner for approval to research.
• A short summary that tells the reader what the project is, why it is important, and how it will
be carried out. Or a SLP is a prelude to a full paper. What is the full paper all about? The
full paper may be a thesis, a program, a project, or anything that will require a longer time
to prepare.
• In essence, a SLP embodiment of your ideas on a certain topic or item of interest
• The SLP helps researcher spot holes in her or his project that might later prove fatal. It is far
better to be clear at the beginning than to put in a lot of effort for nothing.

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 Document Code FM-STL-013
Saint Louis University Revision No. 01
School of Teacher Education and Liberal Arts Effectivity June 07, 2021
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FORMAT OF SLU-NSTP SLP

Title: (of the project)

I. SLU’S VMO Statement
II. Core Values
III. School: (If there’s more than one then indicate all the school the members come from)
IV. Program: (If there’s more than one then indicate all programs the members enrolled in)
V. Rationale: (one paragraph)
VI. Partner and Profile of Partner Community: (this part needs further communication with your
Supervising Instructor)
What is the partner community? Where it is located? Who are the people in the partner
community (leaders, businessmen,)? What are the sectors present in the partner community
(religion, economic, political, education, social)? What are the needs/problems seen in the
community? (These can be answered through your observation or assessment in your
community))

VII. Matrix of Service Learning Program Activities

Program Nexus Activities Competencies Assessment Persons In-Charge
Outcome and their
Responsibilities

VIII. Appendices
A. Program of Activities

Date and Venue Detailed Activities (can be lifted Competencies

from the monitoring forms)

B. Consent from Partner Community (if applicable)

C. Budget proposal

Nexus Activities Materials Budget Source of

Needed Budget

IX. Impact Assessment: The group will plan possible impact of the project to the community.

X. End-of-Activity Report: 500-word summary report of the conducted activity (intro (who, what,
when where-identified problem (why)-activity/method/conducted intervention (how) – impact
assessment result)

XI. Documentations (properly labelled- before, during and after with videos)

Approved by:

ERMILYN P. RAMOS CHARMAINE P. MENDOZA, LPT, MAED

Supervising Instructor Department Head Director, CEOPO

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 Document Code FM-STL-013
Saint Louis University Revision No. 01
School of Teacher Education and Liberal Arts Effectivity June 07, 2021
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B. PROJECT IMPLEMENTATION

Project implementation (or project execution) is the phase where visions and plans
become reality. During the implementation phase, the project plan is put into motion and the work
of the project is performed. It is important to maintain control and communicate as needed during
implementation. Progress is continuously monitored and appropriate adjustments are made and
recorded as variances from the original plan. In any project, a project manager spends most of
the time in this step. During project implementation, people are carrying out the tasks, and
progress information is being reported through regular team meetings. The project manager uses
this information to maintain control over the direction of the project by comparing the progress
reports with the project plan to measure the performance of the project activities and take
corrective action as needed. The first course of action should always be to bring the project back
on course (i.e., to return it to the original plan). If that cannot happen, the team should record
variations from the original plan and record and publish modifications to the plan. Throughout this
step, project sponsors and other key stakeholders should be kept informed of the project’s status
according to the agreed-on frequency and format of communication. The plan should be
updated and published on a regular basis.

The implementation phase involves putting the project plan into action. It’s here that the
project manager will coordinate and direct project resources to meet the objectives of the
project plan. As the project unfolds, it’s the project manager’s job to direct and manage each
activity, every step of the way. That’s what happens in the implementation phase of the project
life cycle: you follow the plan you’ve put together and handle any problems that come up.

The implementation phase is where you and your project team actually do the project
work to produce the deliverables. The word “deliverable” means anything your project delivers.
The deliverables for your project include all of the products or services that you and your team
are performing for the client, customer, or sponsor, including all the project management
documents that you put together.

C. PROJECT SUPERVISION AND MONITORING

Supervision is a process which aims to support, assure and develop the knowledge, skills and
values of the person being supervised (supervisee), team or project group. It provides
accountability for both the supervisor and supervisee in exploring practice and performance.
Supervision is a process by which one worker is given responsibility by the organization to
work with another worker(s) in order to meet certain organizational, professional and personal
objectives which together promote the best outcomes for service users.’ (Morrison, T.) An
accountable, two-way process, which supports, motivates and enables the development of good
practice for individual social care workers. As a result, this improves the quality of service provided
by the organization.
Monitoring provides information as to what the status of a particular
program, project or policy is at any moment, or is going to be over time, and how well
the functioning of various processes in the project, including the resources allotted for it
relate to targets and deliverables.

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 Document Code FM-STL-013
Saint Louis University Revision No. 01
School of Teacher Education and Liberal Arts Effectivity June 07, 2021
Page 7 of 7

Monitoring can be defined as control of the project implementation in order to

keep the project on track and achieve the end results of the project.

Why projects should be monitored?

• Get sound visibility into project execution.

• Determine what actions need to be taken to determine that project objectives and
goals are successfully met.
• How project goals relate to team efforts, delivery schedules and quality of
deliverables.
• Allow the team to educate and learn for itself from its past experiences and
improve its productivity levels.
• Make the team accountable for the work it carries out by evaluating the
performance metrics.
• Justify the capital invested by the stakeholders and investors.

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means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise of any part of this document, without the prior written permission of SLU, is strictly prohibited.