Investigation Planning Checklist
A printable pre-investigation planning checklist covering research question, scope, sources, legal boundaries, ethics, and time budget.
Investigation Planning Checklist
Planning is the cheapest phase of an investigation and the one most often skipped. Every hour spent on a clear research question, a defensible scope, and an explicit legal-and-ethical frame saves days of rework later — and prevents the category of failure where an investigator discovers, mid-collection, that they do not actually know what they are looking for.
This checklist walks through a planning session for any OSINT investigation: journalistic, academic, compliance, or civic. Run it before collection begins, and again whenever the scope appears to be drifting.
Why a planning checklist
A documented plan makes three things easier:
- Scoping conversations with editors, supervisors, clients, or co-investigators become concrete.
- Decisions under pressure later in the investigation — what to publish, what to withhold, when to stop — have a written baseline to refer back to.
- Post-mortems after the work is published (or abandoned) can tell whether the failure was in plan, execution, or analysis.
The checklist below is short on purpose. Planning should take hours, not weeks. If a planning session is stretching past a day, the research question is probably still too broad.
How to use this page
Work through every item. Write your answers in a shared document that your team and your editor or counsel can review. Revisit the list weekly while the investigation is active.
Print this page
Use your browser's print function (Ctrl+P / Cmd+P) and select "Save as PDF" to keep a local, dated copy of your completed plan. The @media print styles strip navigation and formatting for a clean archival copy.
Investigation planning checklist
1. Research question
2. Scope and boundaries
3. Sources
4. Legal boundaries
5. Ethics
6. Time and resource budget
7. Outputs
Completed by: ______________________ Date: __________ Review date: __________
For the methodology context behind this checklist, see the planning phase guide. For a legal-and-ethical review to run before publishing, use the OSINT legal and ethical review.