Mission, goals, tasks. Now that you have written your mission statement and identified supporting goals, you are ready to divide each of the goals into smaller, supporting tasks. A task, for our purposes, may be defined “as a clearly defined piece of important, quality work that can be completed by one or two people in a relatively short period of time”. Generally speaking, the mission statement provides a “top-down” integrated design, the goals provide manageable and measurable achievements, and the tasks provide for “bottom-up” implementation. Attempting a top-down implementation is often difficult, expensive, and sometimes unachievable. Bottom-up implementation is much easier, less expensive, and achievable—even for very large undertakings. Our hope is that BookWise Independent Representatives will follow their roadmap and develop their on-line store by first defining their mission, goals and tasks, and then following the “bottom-up” implementation strategy. Supporting tasks. Each goal may be divided into supporting tasks by writing down the goal, then with a team of two or three people, write down the three or four tasks necessary for completing the stated goal. Each task should describe “What is to be done?”, “How will quality be measured?”, “When is it to be done?”, and “Who is to do it?” Suppose, for example your goal is: “Implement proven ways to promote literacy among young readers.” Using your pencil or marker you can number and underline key concepts that can be used in formulating supporting tasks as shown: (1) Implement proven ways to (2) promote literacy among (3) young readers. Now, converting these key concepts into tasks is relatively easy when you answer the four questions of What, How, When, and Who described above. Let us take the first concept of “Implement proven ways”. Before we can implement proven ways we must first discover what these proven ways are, this answering the question: “What is to be done?” and partially answers the second question of “How will quality be measured?” The term “proven ways” gives a good hint that it must be something that is accepted as workable and replicable. The answer to question three “When is it to be done?” depends on a number of factors such as time available for the entire undertaking, available resources, and how long the task itself will take. One common way is to state the expected completion date for the task as “to be completed by 11/10/2006.” This leaves the last question to be answered. “Who is to do it?” This may be answered by identifying qualified and interested individuals within your organization, or qualified consultants or volunteers. Defining tasks gets easier with practice, so don’t give up easily. By continuing the process of analysis and synthesis for each of the other concepts we might end up with the following tasks for Goal 1 - Implement proven ways to promote literacy among young readers: □ Task 1.1 Identify ways for promoting literacy among young readers by 6/10/06. □ Task 1.2 Establish criteria for evaluating, ranking, and selecting the “best” method by 6/30/06. □ Task 1.3 Identify candidate “young readers” and parents in our community by 7/30/06. □ Task 1.4 Select the “best” method for promoting literacy and conduct practice sessions by 7/15/02. □ Task 1.5 Invite “young readers” and parents to a literacy promotion experience on 8/01/06. □ Task 1.6 Conduct the literacy promotion experience, and assess results. Finally, check to see that if by completing the tasks listed above, you have completed that particular goal. Adjust if necessary. Number each Task to correspond with its goal—(i.e. Task 1.1, Task 1.2, Task 2.1, Task 2.2, etc.). The thing to remember is that you can adjust and refine your supporting tasks as necessary, so don't get uptight if they are not perfect at first.