Category: Tools

Template planning

Dit onderdeel staat vermeld in het Handboek voor onderzoeksjournalisten. Voor een vertaling naar het Nederlands kunt rechts van deze tekst via Google Translate de pagina laten vertalen.

Coco Gubbels

Part of the projectplan is the planning. This may be one of the most boring and time killing tasks to do, but it will give you and your team major insights!!

Start with these five fases:
– Preparation
– Research
– Writing
– Editing
– Publication
– Postmortem or evaluation

Per fase you will need to gather all the tasks to be done, by everyone in the team. If you know who is going to be in your team, you can ask them to fill in this template to give input to you as coordinator.

Tip: by letting them fill in the timing and duration they will become true owners of that task in stead of you giving them something to do. They need to think about when they can start and when they will be finished doing the task. It is also a commitment to the team to execute this task as filled in by themselves.

If you have many people in your team, this may become a pretty large file, but you can keep it as simple or as complex as you want or need it to be.

english template
nederlandse template

Tasks in phase 1 (examples):

  • Kick off meeting: planned
  • Kick off meeting: agenda shared
  • Periodic meetings: sending invitation to teammembers
  • MoU: signed by all teammembers
  • Folders for documents in place
  • Communication channels in place

Tasks in phase 2 (examples):

  • Research in country A
  • Research in country B
  • Research in country C
  • Compare findings
  • Resume research in country A on topic X
  • Resume research in country A on topic Y
  • Resume research in country B on topic Y
  • Compare findings
  • Final checks

Tasks in phase 3 (examples):

  • Writing first part for country A, B and C to share as first publication on date D
  • Writing / preparing publication for country A (follow up)
  • Writing / preparing publication for country B (follow up)
  • Writing / preparing publication for country C (follow up)
  • Writing / preparing publication or podcast serie
  • Writing / preparing video including filming
  • Writing marketing texts and pre-publication texts

Tasks in phase 4 (examples):

  • Editing video for first publication (including voice overs)
  • Editing podcast part 1
  • Editing podcast part 2
  • Editing tekst first publication
  • Editing tekst for country A
  • Editing tekst for country B
  • Editing tekst for country C

Tasks in phase 5 (examples):

  • Publication of first article and video
  • Pre publication (marketing) of podcast
  • Publication of podcast part 1
  • Publication of podcast part 2
  • Publication of tekst for country A (follow up)
  • Publication of tekst for country B (follow up)
  • Publication of tekst for country C (follow up)

Tasks in phase 5 (examples):

In the final phase you just need to agree on how and how many times you will get back together for a review and evaluation. It also depends on how publication is planned: with just one big bang or a shared first publication with follow ups per country or topic.

“If you don’t know where you are going. How can you expect to get there?”

Basil S. Walsh

Template Projectplan

Dit onderdeel staat vermeld in het Handboek voor onderzoeksjournalisten. Voor een vertaling naar het Nederlands kunt rechts van deze tekst via Google Translate de pagina laten vertalen.

Coco Gubbels

A good investigative journalism project starts with a good plan. Although many journalists prefer to just start with the investigation, discussing and drawing up a projectplan is the most important part of the collaboration. In putting this plan together, you and the team have to think about what you are going to do, with whom, when and what your result will be. In addition, you also need this data to request an appropriate budget.

Writing down a projectplan makes you as a team think about what you will and will not investigate, what your goal is, how you want to get there and what you need. In addition, you will notice that there may be various interpretations in the team of what constitutes an investigation of a publication.

Assumptions or not properly discussing expectations and interpretations can really hinder an investigation later on and even drive teams apart. There are important points examining communication and interpretations. All the more important to take the time to properly review your research and process with everyone on the team.

Only if you have discussed all these elements with each other and if there are still uncertainties or questions, then you can continue with your research. An additional advantage is that you can use it as a template for the applications you want to make for grants. So you have already done the preparatory work for both the planning and the budget.

The project plan:
• Who’s on the team
• What is the aim of the research
• What is the story/hypothesis
• What has already been published and what are you adding
• How do you go about publishing
• Publication: form, number, planning, where and by whom
• What do you need in terms of software and other resources?

You can download this English version of the project plan template. It may be too elaborate for you small team, but a cross-border team may very well need to fill in every part to cover all agreements within the team. My personal advise is to write down something anyway: have you thought about it, did you agree to skip it and why? Because that may also be an answer.

In the project plan you can refer to the risk management log and the project planning.

Template EN
Template NL