Your project plan can make or break your project.
It really is that important.
And in this video, I'm going to share with you how you can
make a project plan in Excel, which is super easy
that everyone can follow.
Now, if you want to even be more of a master of projects,
stay tuned to the end of this video because I have something
for you, it is my six basics that all projects must have
and I'm going to share with you how to get your hands on
that at the end of this video.
Hi if you're new here, welcome.
My name is Adriana Girdler and you have landed
on the best practical project management channel
in YouTube world.
Now, that all being said, I am so excited to be sharing
with you how to make an action plan from Excel.
So if you want to get on that bandwagon with me,
let's go to it.
All right, now that we have this blank Excel sheet here,
what do you do?
There's a couple of basics that I'd like to start off with.
So I'm going to start off with section A, and don't worry
about formatting yet.
We're going to start off with action item,
and my spelling voice is terrible, so my apology.
I'm going to hit the Tab key, we're now going to go for a
start date, and again, don't worry about formatting.
We're going to do an end date, I always go for a duration.
And this is going to actually be for a scheduling
perspective when we do Gantt charts at another video,
actually. We're going to talk about progress percentage
here. There are individuals who really like to have this,
so I do add it on, you don't have to.
Very important, we're going to talk about responsibility,
who owns these tasks, and last but not least,
one of my favorites comments.
Something that is why I continuously use Excel,
because of this one thing, I have the ability to put a whole
bunch of comments.
So let me now go and make these wider.
You see what I did there?
Little trick, if you go to the corner and you highlight
everything, it will move it all,
and if you don't wanna do that, because let's say you only
want the one to be big, click that, click it,
and just go over to the line of that column
and you can make that big.
'Cause you want to make sure you have enough space
for your action items.
Start and end date, I'm good there, let me just move
that over, duration, progress, responsibility,
comments is another one I like to make really big.
And so there we go, we now have the base of our framework.
So there's just a few things I'm going to suggest here.
So let's just go in here, and I like to do a little bit
of lines just to get that organized.
And as we do that, I'm going to highlight B and C
and I'm going to go over to font.
And based on that, let's bring up with the little corner
here, let's just make sure we have the right date
the way we like to have it, 'cause it always drives me nuts
when it's never done correctly.
Personally, I'm a fan of, let's see if they have the one
I like.
Yeah, I actually like to spell it out.
That's me personally 'cause I find usually there's some
months that are not, is that a date or is that a month?
So that's why I like to spell it out like that,
percentage progress.
So here's our opportunity to highlight that again
go under Font, click on that little arrow there
and now let's go to number and let's just make sure
we have percentage all set up here.
Great, actually I don't want any decimal places.
So I'm going to scroll down there, there we go.
And the rest is good for now.
So this is a generic framework that we are looking
to actually have with an action plan.
It's super, super simple, but there's going to be power
behind this and I'm going to show you it in one second.
But with the power of video, I'm actually going to fill in
some tasks in for you and some dates.
So I'll be back, just gimme a second.
Now that we have our Excel action plan filled out,
let me just kind of explain this a little bit
since you're seeing this, and it's really for a brand new
project I'm bringing it back to my engineering days
where we were installing new equipment on a packaging line.
And so really here's some high level stuff of what it is
that we have to do for this particular task.
And I have the dates in here of when we're going to start
and we have duration, progress, responsibility and commerce,
but you'll notice what's next once you fill out
what you're going to do.
And that's duration, but duration is a formula.
So let's now deal with that.
So I'm going to highlight the cell, I'm do the equal sign
and I'm just basically going to take the end date minus
the start date enter, and that gives me the duration
and what I love about Excel and the power of it,
is if I highlight that and go to the corner,
so I see this plus sign, I take that formula
and I put it across everything.
So now I have this formula, I just created it once.
And it's duplicated in all the other cells.
Progress is something that you put yourself.
I give that power to the individuals who have to give me
a status update.
And at this moment we don't have anything in comments
because this is an opportunity for team members
to provide comments on status, roadblocks
things of that nature. but we're not done.
This is just the starting of this.
We have a few other things that I want to share with you
really the power of using Excel and why I love it
as an action plan.
So let's clean this up a bit, because one thing
I'm not liking is I do like things to be centered a bit.
So I'm going to do that here.
I highlighted B C, D E as you can tell
and I am now going to go here and go center and center
just looks prettier in my opinion, I'm also going to go to A
and I'm going to rap text because there are times
when my text does rap, and I want it all to be together.
Now, something else that I'm already noticing
which I don't like is, it's a personal opinion.
Everything's on the bottom line, I like everything
to be on the top, as to make my life easy again,
I'm going to go to that corner.
I'm now going to say everything's at the top.
It just keeps it nice and tight.
I know for these activities I don't have anything else
that's going to be added, so I'm gonna go to these lines
and I'm going to delete those extra ones because I didn't
know at the time when I created I needed it.
So now this is really clean, precise.
Now I'm also 'cause I'm a little bit of making
things pretty.
I'm making this a little bit bigger
and I'm going to put that all in the center there
and I'm going to color code it, 'cause I really wanna
distinguish those colors.
Now, here's very simple you could be good like this.
But I want to take it one step further for you.
Let's go to line one, right click and go to Insert.
And as we insert we have a brand new line here above
our line, I'm going to do a couple more okay?
And another little trick is if you just don't want to go
line by line and you have these two here
we're going to highlight them both, right click, Insert,
and now I've just doubled the amount of lines.
So this is perfect, this is exactly what I want.
We're going to add two more things here.
We're going to add a past due, and we're gonna have another
one called due soon.
And what I really like about this, is I'm going to share
with you in a moment is the power of letting me know
what do I need to focus my attention on,
because as someone who's a project manager
and a lean six Sigma expert visual management now becomes
really critical.
So let's talk about that.
So in order to do past due, I need today's date.
So let's create a formula for today's date
if you do equal sign, so don't forget put your cursor
in the cell that you want it, equal sign and I'm going to
write today bracket bracket enter, and that gives me
today's date. And now due soon can be any date.
I'm going to go September 30th.
So this now is letting me know I'm going to be using it
for a conditional formatting.
So let's talk to that.
Are you enjoying this so far and learning a lot?
If you are, please give this video a like,
put some comments below, it tells you to,
we're doing a good job.
Now let's go back to those Excel action plan.
So the conditional formatting is really for the end dates.
I'm driven by end dates when I do my project plans
is I really want to know where are we from an end date
perspective?
So I'm going to highlight again I only have to focus on
one cell to get all my conditioning formatting proper.
And there's two rules we're going to focus on again.
There's multiple rules you can do, as many as you like
depending upon your needs but let's focus on the two
most important ones.
So I want to know when something's past due,
and I want to visually look at that very quickly.
I also want to know if something is going to be due soon
so I can focus my attention on that,
knowing that it's coming.
So when you click on conditional formatting right here
and you go to Highlight cells and let's do one
that's past due.
So the one we do for that is if it's less than
and I'm now going to make sure less than,
and if it's less than September 1st,
light fill with dark red I'm actually okay with that.
I'm going to keep that.
And then the next one I want to do, is the in between.
So I'm now going to go here if I have in between,
so now if I have something that is in between September 1st
and my due soon, I'm going to make that yellow fill
with dark yellow text.
So now what is this doing exactly?
Well, hold on, I'm gonna share with you.
Let me just kind of put it out there by doing a format
painter and I'm now going to format all of this.
So now what I'm going to do is because of the formula
that I put in here and the formula up here,
if I ever have anything that's past due it's going to turn
red. So let me just go in here and go let's say this was
August 30th, I know it doesn't match start date.
It would automatically turn red.
And that would show me immediately wow, this is due
I better put some really good comments here.
And let me just turn that back, September 30th,
now let's say I had something here,
let's say this was September 15th.
That again would tell me that, oh, these are the items
that I'm going to have to start working on soon.
It becomes really powerful.
So I'm just going to do the back arrow to take away that
date. Now here's where the power is.
It may be mid-September, let's say September 15th.
And I update my project plan every week or every two weeks
for my team, so I may go, you know what?
I want them to now start being aware of things
coming down the pike, and I want to make sure that
we always four weeks out and you see what happened
when I change that date there, this October 14th
also got highlighted.
So now we're continuously really getting updated
and ensuring that we're on track and it's just a really
great visual tool, something that I love.
And so what I do because I'm a big believer in color coding
is I will do this will always be in the red,
because we all can relate to that, and this due soon
will always be in the yellow, and so we'll do that
so that they all know focus on the red and the yellow.
That's how I kinda talk to my team.
I want you to focus on the red and the yellow.
If anything is red, when I'm always talking about the end
date, give a comment, a suggested new due date
and focus on the yellow are things that are coming soon
and to bring your attention to them.
So this now is how we basically can run a project
using Excel and monitoring our action plan.
And now the last thing I want to share with you
is how do you clean this up?
And actually, how do you use it really for a full project?
This is a tab of tasks, but let's be honest.
If projects were just these amount of tasks
we would need project managers,
everyone can do their own thing.
Usually there are hundreds of tasks
depending on the complexity of the project.
And that's why I love Excel because you can actually start
using tabs and everyone can have their own tab,
every department, person however you want to set it up.
So what I usually do, just so you know is I usually put
the project name, I can't spell project, name,
I'll put in here.
Let's just call it packaging line install.
And this is going to be a department and let's call
this engineering.
And I'm a terrible speller by the way.
Now with ever department, I'm going to do,
I'm also going to change by going right click on the tab.
I'm going to go rename and I'm going to call this
engineering. So now that I know when I hop on this it's
engineering, something else I do which I find very helpful
is updated on. So a lot of times I will do an update on for
myself so that people know when I were in it or if someone
else was in it we know what the latest version is.
So now that this is cleaned up and again you can add
as much here, you can do more cleaning up,
it's really up to you.
Again the critical thing here is you have your duration
formula, you have your past due formula
and your conditional formatting here
so that you can pop things out.
What I'm going to do is I'm now going to copy tap.
So I usually, this is kind of the last thing
'cause I'm probably going to have, sometimes I have like
10 departments that are working with me and they all have
their own tasks.
So I created the one I'm now going to right click
and I'm going to go to Move copy, and I'm just going to say,
Create a copy, and it's created inch number two.
So let me rename that.
And I'm going to just say blank, because now what I'm going
to do is I'm now going to that I have everything set up,
I'm going to take away the department name,
I'm going to take away the tasks, I'm going to take away my
dates and I'm going to take away all this other stuff.
And now what you have is you have your baseline
really your format, your template for your action plan,
moving forward.
So I can do as many of these tabs now that's cleaned up.
I'm going to do this, I'm going to go create a copy,
create another one, one more, just because I have quite
a few people create a copy.
All right, so what I will then do afterwards
is I will assign each department, each person
however I broken up my project, their own tab.
They would go in, fill it out.
And again I already have the conditional formatting
in there, so it's going to start to color code accordingly
based on the dates I have here.
This is a really simple, easy, a nice way to monitor
your project tasks and everyone has access to Excel
and it's going to highlight certain things for you.
And it's going to be a really powerful tool to keep
you organized and on track.
All right, now that you know how to create a solid plan.
I'm so excited for you, I need you to get this because,
again, I want your brilliance to shine through
not just in your plans, but in everything else you do.
So check this out it is free.
Link is under this video, grab it just for you, my gift.