Using the Planning Canvas

Brainstorm potential Annual Priorities, map out a 4-quarter flyover plan, and easily convert ideas to goals

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Why Use the Planning Canvas

The purpose of the screen is to help you brainstorm, visualize, and create your execution plan for the year. Create a blueprint for the year and see where you may have resource constraints or time challenges with your top Annual Priorities. Having this visual will help you identify and negotiate those potential obstacles as a team before the year starts.

How to Use the Planning Canvas

1. Go to Team Annual Plan in the Execution Menu
2. Click the Planning Canvas Tab
3. Click the + in the top right to add ideas for Draft Annual Priorities. You can add them manually or use the stepper to generate draft goals with Rhythm Intelligence.
   1. If you use Rhythm Intelligence, you can choose elements of your strategy, Annual Focus, and past goal performance to enhance the suggested goals with your specific company information.
   2. Using Rhythm Intelligence will create draft goals complete with suggestions for Red-Yellow-Green success criteria and draft Quarter Priorities as well.
   3. If you add goals manually, you can also choose to bring any incomplete goals from last year into the canvas and extend the dates so you can continue working on them in the new year.
4. Once you've created draft annual goals, discuss and agree on the top 3-5 ideas in the list. You can drag and drop to reorder the items and click the card to open the side panel to edit and assign owners.
5. Use the arrow to expand each potential Annual Priority. You will see a card for one draft Quarter Priority for the team in each quarter of the year. Each draft Quarter Priority also has been broken down into two child Quarter Priorities. Click the card to open the side panel for each Quarter Priority to edit it and assign owners.
   
   Remember: You should be mapping out the potential Quarter Priorities you'll need to do to achieve the Annual Priorities successfully. 
6. Use the + to add more draft Quarter Priorities for each Annual Priority, either manually or using Rhythm Intelligence suggestions. 
7. Identify time constraints and quarters that are overloaded with too much work using the counts at the top of the screen. Drag and drop potential Quarter Priorities to move them to a different quarter.
   
   

Publishing Goals

Once you've refined your draft goals on the canvas, you can easily click to Publish the draft goals. Publishing the goals will create real goals that are linked to the Annual and Quarter Plan Dashboards and linked to each other following the hierarchy you set in the canvas. Once goals are published, the canvas and goals will remain in sync (editing goals in other screens will update the card on the canvas and editing the cards on the canvas will update the goals).

1. Click the Publish button at the top right of the screen. Follow the steps to select the quarter with the goals you want to publish, check the boxes for each goal (or use the icons to Expand All and Select All), and then click to publish.
2. You can also convert any Draft Priorities individually to goals by clicking the More Actions button   and choosing "Publish." You can easily Create a Task from here as well.

You can click on the cards for published goals on the Planning Canvas to see the associated Goals. You can click on those goals to work on the details.

Unpublishing / Deleting Goals

Draft Goals:

For goals that have not been published, you can use the More Actions button to delete the drafts. Deleting a parent goal on the canvas will delete all of the draft child goals underneath it.

You will not be able to delete a Draft goal if there are any Published child goals. You'll need to unpublish the goals before deleting the drafts.

Published Goals:

You can unpublish goals on the canvas using the More Actions button. Unpublishing a gaol will return the cards in the Planning Canvas back to the draft state. The associated goals generated when you publish the draft will be DELETED.

If a published goal has a status update (Red Yellow Green status or Projected, Actual, Variance values), Unpublishing it will not delete the associated goal, but it will no longer be synced to the draft goals in the Planning Canvas.