The Swanirvar Family Planning Services Project in Bangladesh developed a monthly work plan for its family planning fieldworkers. Prior to using this work plan fieldworkers scheduled their work on a day-by-day basis and did not have an explicit plan to show how they were going to visit all the couples assigned to them within a reasonable period of time. As a result, their work was not well coordinated, their time was not being used very efficiently, and fieldworkers completed a cycle of visits only once every six to eight weeks.
Monthly work plans were developed individually for each worker. The work plans showed the Swanirvar workers, a whole month in advance, what they would be doing and where they would be going every day of the upcoming month. The work plans included such events as staff meetings, supervisory meetings, and holidays.
As part of the initial program planning, each household in a fieldworker's area was assigned a number. The work plan then allocated the numbers among the work days of the upcoming month, representing the households to visit each day. By designating which households would be visited a whole month in advance, fieldworkers knew exactly which couples to visit each day and could see the total number of couples they had visited each month. With this plan, each couple was visited at least once a month. This process substantially improved fieldworker efficiency and helped to generate client confidence through more frequent visits.
A parallel work plan for each supervisor was also developed to ensure that supervisors visited fieldworkers regularly for contraceptive re-supply and supervisory support. This allowed fieldworkers and supervisors to coordinate their time by knowing, in advance, when a supervisory visit would occur. This also allowed fieldworkers to prepare their service data in advance, to make lists of any special concerns that needed to be addressed, and to be able to depend on receiving supplies on a regular basis. The supervisor's work plans had to be coordinated with the program manager's monitoring schedule and the relevant components of central office work plans.
Once this system of monthly work plans for field workers and supervisors was established, it became a regular practice to revise them at the beginning of each month.
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