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Creating an Annual Plan

Drive your strategy forward with a focused Annual Plan

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Note: This content reflects our Premium software's default features and labels. For any questions, please email help@rhythmsystems.com.

Why Annual Planning Matters

The right Annual Plan is vital to ensure you have a successful year of growth in the business. It will provide inspired focus for your people and will serve as the foundation of each one of your Quarterly Plans.

Building Your Team's Annual Plan

Most companies meet for a 2-day planning session to build a plan for the year. Here's what we recommend before, during and after your session:
  1. Prepare for your session
    1. Set up your Planning Meeting: Go to Team Annual Plan and choose the Planning Meetings tab. Create a meeting record, invite the team, and customize the agenda. You can also download a slide deck to use in your session from here.
    2. Send out prep work: We recommend asking participants to use the Idea Board for a Start, Stop, Keep exercise. You can also ask the team to update the current status of any Winning Moves they own and come prepared with any data or insights to have the right discussions during planning based on your agenda.
  2. Run the session. You can follow the detailed best practice agenda in the Annual Planning Meeting you created. Here are the key elements of the Annual Plan you need to determine as a team:
    1. Annual Focus: Go to Team Annual Plan and choose the Annual Focus tab to record your Main Thing, describe success, and how you will celebrate. You can also capture a Destination Postcard to set a vision for a successful year.
    2. Top 3-5 Annual Priorities for the Team: You can use the Plan Builder screen to brainstorm your Annual Plan goals. Agree on the most important Annual Priorities together and record them with Red Yellow Green success criteria. When you're done brainstorming and editing your canvas, publish the goals to link them to the Annual Plan Dashboard automatically. Link them to relevant Company Annual Priorities or Winning Moves they support.
    3. Quarter Plan: You should build a plan for the first quarter of your year that includes all the elements of a Team Quarter Plan. The easiest way to set up your Q1 plan is to use the Plan Builder; publishing the priorities there will automatically link them correctly.

Tip: Once you've identified your top goals for the year, you can add them to the Annual Plan Goals dashboard in the Goal Dashboards tab to recreate a simple, organized view of your top KPIs and Priorities for the year.