Drive your strategy forward with a focused Annual Plan
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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:
- Prepare for your session
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- Top 3-5 Annual Priorities for the Team: Agree on the most important Annual Priorities together and record them with Red Yellow Green success criteria. You can use the Planning Canvas screen to brainstorm your Annual Plan goals. Link them to relevant Company Annual Priorities or Winning Moves they support. You can also check the box to add the new Team goal to the Annual Plan Dashboard before you hit save.
- Quarter Plan: You should build a plan for the first quarter of your year that includes all the elements of a Team Quarter Plan.
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.