Five Questions for a Monday Morning: Telling a Real Plan from a Presentable One

There is a particular kind of plan that photographs well. It has phases, a Gantt chart with pleasing overlaps, and a milestone set that lines up neatly with the financial year. It is also, quite often, inert. The tell is not in the document but in the week: what actually gets decided, unblocked and committed between Monday and Friday.

The following five questions are deliberately low-tech. They are not a maturity model and they do not require a tool. They are simply a way of testing, in about twenty minutes, whether the plan in front of you is doing any work.

Why questions beat dashboards

A dashboard reports what has already happened. It is a record of the past dressed as a forecast. Questions, by contrast, force a team to demonstrate that someone has thought about the next seven days in specific terms — names, dates, dependencies, triggers. A plan that cannot answer them is not necessarily wrong; it is simply not yet a plan.

1. Which dependency outside your control is closest to slipping, and who did you speak to about it on Friday?

Every delivery has a handful of things it cannot do itself: a supplier, another department, a regulatory sign-off, a system that someone else maintains. The question is not whether these are listed. It is whether anyone has been in contact about them recently.

A real plan produces a name, a conversation date and the substance of what was said. A presentable plan produces a risk reference and the words being actively monitored. The former is management. The latter is hope with a reference number.

2. Where is the evidence that the people you need are actually available?

Capacity is where most plans quietly depart from reality. Allocation percentages are the usual culprit: a spreadsheet can assert that a specialist is forty per cent available while their diary, their line manager and their existing commitments say otherwise.

Press for evidence in days rather than proportions. Which named individuals, on which dates, and what has been displaced to make room for them? What does the leave calendar show for the critical fortnight? If the answer requires a follow-up meeting to establish, the plan is currently an aspiration. This is not a criticism of the team; it is simply the point at which a schedule stops being arithmetic and becomes a commitment.

3. Who is the named decision owner for the next pending choice, and by what date will they decide?

Unresolved decisions are the most expensive form of delay, because they consume attention without producing progress. A plan that carries open choices without owners is drifting, however tidy its critical path.

What you are listening for is a single individual, a date, and a clear understanding of what happens if the date passes. A board, a steering group or a working party is not a decision owner; it is a venue. Escalation routes matter too — not as a threat, but as evidence that the plan has a mechanism for the answer being no.

4. What event would cause you to invoke the contingency, and who has the authority to invoke it?

Contingency that has no pre-agreed trigger is not contingency; it is a reserve of optimism. Before the pressure arrives, the team should be able to describe the specific, observable condition that would cause a fallback to be activated — a date missed, a volume exceeded, a test failed twice — and the role empowered to call it.

This matters most in the middle of a difficult week, when judgement is poor and escalation feels expensive. A trigger agreed in calm conditions protects everyone from the argument that would otherwise take place at the worst possible moment.

5. What is the next irreversible commitment, and when does it fall due?

Every plan has points after which options narrow: a contract signature, a recruitment decision, a public announcement, a decommissioning. These are rarely the largest items on the plan, but they are the ones that determine how much freedom remains.

A functioning plan knows where the next one is and treats its approach as a decision point rather than a diary entry. A presentable plan treats it as a milestone to be reported as on track until the day it is not.

Reading the answers together

Score each question as answered, partially answered or unanswered, and resist the temptation to weight them. Two or three clean answers indicate a plan with genuine grip. Four or five unanswered ones suggest that what exists is a communications artefact.

The conversation itself should be neutral in tone. This is not an audit and the objective is not to catch anyone out; it is to establish where clarity is missing while there is still time to supply it. A team that says plainly that it does not yet know who owns a decision is in a far stronger position than one that improvises an answer to close the topic down.

Run the five questions at the same point each week, with the same people, and the pattern becomes visible quickly. Some teams will find the same question unanswered three weeks running. That is the useful signal — more useful than any colour-coded cell, because it points to a specific gap that a specific person can close.

When the answer is that someone will come back to you

Treat that as the finding. Note the question, the person and the date by which the answer will be supplied, then ask it again. Plans improve not through better reporting but through the repeated, slightly uncomfortable act of being asked what happens next, by whom, and on what date. That is the whole test — and it takes less time than building the slide.