Welcome to the annual planning season. To ensure your annual planning season is the most productive and best ever, the first step is to get organized, and Propel Your Business can help you do just that.
Our first order of business is to create our annual planning initiative. We can do that by going to the initiative module on the left-hand side and clicking on it so we can see our initiative dashboard.
Here I can create an initiative using the “Add Initiative” button in the top right-hand corner.
Here is my annual planning initiative. I’ve already created it, but you can see here that I have given it a description, made sure it had an owner, and then invited everyone on the team that’s involved in this annual planning process. I’ve also pinned it to my meeting series.
Now, your annual planning initiative might look slightly different depending on how your organization is built.
I also decided on a target due date that was after the end of the year so that we could ensure we revisited the plan after last year’s financials came back, and it gave us an opportunity to make sure everything was buttoned up.
Now I’m ready to build the detail in my annual planning initiative. Here you can see that I’ve gotten a head start and started to build my roadmap by adding roadmap items, or the plan details, in order to be able to complete annual planning season.
These details follow and mimic the details that are in your annual planning handbook. So if you follow your annual planning handbook, each one of these details that is included here is also included in the handbook.
I’ll point out that here I also make sure that I add a roadmap item that specifically calls out the need to ensure that I have time and calendar events dedicated to the annual process—both for the company, the departments, our team, and individuals.
Happy annual planning season.