Launch withprecision. The Project & Launch Planner
① The Project
What am I delivering, and by when
② Project at a Glance
Start
Deadline
Team size
Status
③ Success looks like
Definition of done
The one thing that must go right
What "good" looks like for this project
What "great" would look like
④ SMART Goal
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time-bound
⑤ STAR Framework
Situation
Task
Action
Result
⑥ Baseline Metrics — Before We Start
Capture how things are now, before any change — so you can prove the improvement later. Easy to skip, impossible to recreate afterwards.
Metric
Baseline (now)
Target (after)
How measured
⑦ Budget & Capacity
Budget available
Who signs off overspend
Team capacity — real availability
Resource gaps
RACI — Who Does What
For each key area: who's Responsible (does it), Accountable (owns it), Consulted (gives input), Informed (kept in the loop). Clarity here prevents most project friction.
Activity / decision
Responsible
Accountable
Consulted
Informed
Sign-Off Gates
The approvals needed before each phase can proceed — no gate, no go.
Phase / gate
Who must approve
Approved?
Date
Key Milestones
Milestone
Owner
Due
Status
Notes
Critical Path & Dependencies
The chain of must-happen-in-order steps. A slip on the critical path slips the whole project — know which these are.
The critical path — what must happen in sequence
The one slip that delays everything
We depend on…
From whom (team/supplier)
Needed by
Confirmed?
Task List
Task
Priority
Owner
Due
Done?
Agile, simply. Work in short, time-boxed sprints. Keep a prioritised backlog of everything to do, pull the highest-value items into each sprint, and move them across the board as they progress. Review and adjust every sprint.
① Sprint Setup
Sprint #
Start
End
Sprint goal
② Product Backlog — Prioritised
Everything the project might need, in priority order. The top items feed your next sprint.
#
Backlog item / user story
Priority
Estimate (points)
Status
③ Sprint Board
To Do
In Progress
Done
④ Daily Stand-Up Notes
What we did yesterday
What we'll do today
Blockers in our way
Sprint velocity / points done
Change is about people, not just process. A perfect solution fails if the people affected aren't ready, willing, and able. Plan the human side as carefully as the technical.
Who's Affected
Group / team
Internal or external?
How they're affected
Level of change
Onboarding & Upskilling Timeline
Who
What they need to learn
How (method)
By when
Done?
How We'll Make the Change Land
Approach — gamification, training programmes, other?
How we'll embed it so people don't drift back
Detractors — Who's Resisting, and Why
Resistance is information. Understand the why — fear, workload, past experience — and you can bring people round.
Who
Their concern / why
How we'll bring them round
Collaborators, Go-To's & Sounding Boards
My trusted sounding boards
Key collaborators on this project
Cross-functional teams — aware & upskilled?
Knowledge checks & gaps
Stakeholder Map
Stakeholder
Their interest / stake
Influence
Informed?
Customer Experience Impact
Is there a customer impact?
Seamless, or do we tell them?
Communication Plan — Where & How
The right message, to the right people, in the right way. Match the channel to the audience and the size of the change.
Audience
Message
How (face-to-face, guide, Visio, email…)
When
Do we need an end-to-end visual / Visio?
Who do we need to collaborate with on comms?
Ready to go live? This is the pre-launch checklist that catches what's been missed. Work through it honestly — a "no" here is far cheaper than a "no" after go-live.
Process & Documentation
Tools & Systems
Tools needed to deliver successfully
Do we have them? Any gaps?
Data migration & quality
GDPR / data privacy & security signed off
Testing
Test
Who's testing (inc. internal promoters)
Result
Passed?
Rollback & What Might Break
What could break post go-live (systems/process)?
Rollback plan if go-live fails
Escalation Contacts
Area
Contact
Internal / third-party supplier
How to reach (24/7?)
✓ Go-Live Readiness — Final Check
Risks & Dependencies
Risk / Dependency
Likelihood
Impact
Mitigation
Business Continuity
If this change breaks something critical, how does the business keep running?
Critical functions that must keep running
Workaround if the new system/process fails
Who declares an incident, and how
Recovery time we can tolerate
Retrospective
What went well
What didn't
What I learned
What I'd change next time
Project scorecard
On time delivered to schedule
On scope delivered what mattered
Team worked well together
Quality proud of the result
Learning grew from it
Launch isn't the finish line. The weeks after go-live are where value is proven or lost. Monitor, listen, fix fast, and review whether the project actually delivered what it set out to.
① Immediate Health Check — First 48 Hours
Is it working as expected?
Anything broken or urgent?
Who's monitoring, and how
Rollback / contingency plan
Hypercare — The Intensive Support Window
How long is hypercare? (e.g. first 2 weeks)
Who's on hand, and how to reach them
How users get help fast
When & how we exit hypercare to business-as-usual
② Issues & Fixes Log
Issue
Reported by
Severity
Owner
Status
③ Feedback — What People Are Saying
Stakeholder feedback
User / customer feedback
Team feedback
Surprises — good and bad
④ Benefits Review — Did It Deliver?
Come back to this a few weeks on. Measure against the goals you set at the start — the honest test of success.
Goal we set
Target
Actual result
Met?
⑤ Handover & What's Next
Who owns this now (BAU / support)
Documentation & training done?
Improvements for a future phase
How we'll celebrate the win
Put AI to work on the thinking — not on the answers
These prompts are built on the 4Ds: a clear role (Delegation), your real context (Description), a constraint, and an instruction to show its reasoning so the judgement stays yours (Discernment and Diligence).
Six for delivery, mapped to the sections of this planner: the plan, the risks, governance, the people, readiness and the retrospective. They are written for the moments where being challenged is worth more than being helped — before go-live, not after.
Replace the [bracketed] parts with your own words and paste into whichever AI you use.
Build the plan backwards from the date that cannot move
Description
Use with ① Overview and Milestones, at kickoff.
Project: [what it is]. The outcome that counts: [what must be true when it is done]. The date that cannot move: [date]. Today is [date]. Build the plan backwards from that date rather than forwards from today: the milestones in reverse order, what has to be true before each one can start, and where the plan is already tight. Then tell me the first thing that needs to happen in the next thirty minutes.
Why this shape: Forwards planning hides the crunch and puts it at the end. Backwards planning finds it while you can still do something about it.
Pre-mortem: it is six months on and this failed
Discernment
Use with Risks & Continuity, before you are committed.
It is [six months after your launch date] and this project has failed. Here is the plan as it stands: [paste your milestones, owners and assumptions]. Write the three most plausible accounts of how it failed — not disasters, the boring ones: the dependency nobody owned, the assumption that quietly was not true, the group that was never really on board. For each, tell me the earliest signal I would have seen, and how early I would have seen it.
Why this shape: Asking for boring failures rather than dramatic ones is what makes this land. Projects rarely die of catastrophe.
Stress-test the RACI
Discernment
Use with Governance & RACI, once it is drafted and before it is circulated.
Here is my RACI: [paste it]. Find the places where accountability is only apparently clear: anything with more than one A, anything where the A has no real authority over the R, work that falls in the gaps between named owners, and decisions with no named decider. For each, tell me the specific meeting or moment where that ambiguity will surface, and what it will look like when it does.
Why this shape: A RACI looks tidiest on the day it is written. This is about the day it gets tested.
Rehearse the resistance you are expecting
Delegation
Use with Change & People and Impact & Stakeholders, before the conversation.
Play the part of [describe the stakeholder or group and their real position — what they stand to lose, not just their job title]. I am going to tell them: [paste your message]. React as they realistically would, including the objection I am dreading. Stay in role for three exchanges. Then step out and tell me which of their objections was actually fair, and what I said that made it worse.
Why this shape: Rehearsal beats replay. And 'which objection was fair' is the question you will not ask yourself.
Interrogate what 'ready' is hiding
Diligence
Use with Delivery Readiness, at the go/no-go.
Here is my readiness assessment: [paste it]. Every line I have marked green, challenge it. For each, ask me what evidence I have that it is green rather than assumed, who confirmed it and when, and whether it was tested or simply reported. Do not accept 'we have checked'. Then tell me which single green item, if it turned out to be amber, would stop the launch.
Why this shape: The item that would stop the launch is the one worth confirming personally. Readiness reported up a chain gets rounded up at every step.
A retrospective that does not flatter
Diligence
Use with the Retrospective, within a fortnight of go-live.
Here is what happened on this project: [paste the timeline, what slipped, what held]. Write the retrospective I would rather not read. Separate what was genuinely outside our control from what we called outside our control at the time. Identify the decision that cost the most, the point at which we could still have made it differently, and the thing that went well only because someone worked unreasonably hard.
Why this shape: That last one is the finding most retrospectives miss. Heroics are a risk you got away with, not a process you can repeat.
These six are built on the four habits taught free in the SMART AI guide library — Delegation, Description, Discernment, Diligence. Learn the method once and you can write your own. This planner works completely without AI; nothing here is required.