5 steps to optimize your strategic planning
Make planning more efficient, effective, and easy to follow with these simple steps.
Rachel Ding
Solutions Architect at Coda
5 steps to optimize your strategic planning
By Rachel Ding
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Here at Coda, we love a good planning cycle. But we know that for many, strategic planning can feel a little daunting. Mapping out all the exciting things you’re going to do next should be fun, but all too often the process ends up being stressful, disorganized, and drawn out. But it doesn’t need to be! We’ve learned from hundreds of teams and put together five simple steps for a successful strategic planning process. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind as you move through the steps:
- Before you start, define and share the plan for planning. Include clear deadlines and assign responsibilities for each step (more on that here).
- Make sure everyone knows which step you’re currently at and what they need to do. A centralized planning doc is great for this. Daily automated Slack messages during the planning week can also help remind everyone what step you’re on and their next action items.
Step 1: Reflect on your current planning process.
However you’ve done planning previously, it’s wise to reflect on what worked and any learnings you want to apply this time around. This isn’t about grading each OKR or goal (though we recommend doing that too), but more about looking back on the process itself. It’s best to ask people from across the company for feedback—that might be everyone if you’re a smaller team, or a representative from each level/team if you’re at a larger company. You could do this through an interactive retrospective meeting or an org-wide exercise like a planning survey, so your lessons are also documented for future reference.Step 2: Collect guidance from leadership.
Planning should always start with strategic guidance from your company leadership on what they want to accomplish over the next quarter(s). This is essential for making sure teams are aligned and not wasting time running in different directions. Providing clear priorities also helps teams feel focused and energized when they get down to planning. We’ve found that the most effective top-down guidance is:- Clear and concise to make it easy to understand and remember.
- Centralized in one place so it can be easily referenced and stays consistent.
- Timely to give teams enough space to digest and plan. It’s also key that guidance doesn’t change later in the process.
- Not too directive. It should provide direction and guardrails, but also give teams the opportunity to suggest their own ideas and solutions. This allows room for creativity and also places less burden on leaders to come up with all the plans. It’s also a good idea to include what you’re not focused on, too.
Step 3: Let teams get creative.
Once leadership provides guidance, it’s time for teams to start planning (sometimes called “bottom-up planning”). Make sure there’s dedicated time and space for this—it’s difficult to generate creative ideas and ambitious plans if you’re trying to do it in the 10 minutes between back-to-back meetings or on top of your usual day’s work. Trust us, time invested now will pay off in the long run! At Coda, we spend more than half of our overall planning time in this step. There are many different ways to generate ideas and plans, so it’s all about finding what works for you. We recommend each team having their own team hub to collect feedback and ideas continuously. Then, when planning time comes around, you can run an exercise like the “garden party” to prioritize. For more ideas on how to generate plans, take a look at The Ultimate Coda Handbook for Planning and OKRs.Step 4: Protect your priorities.
After Step 3, you’ll usually find that teams are overcommitted due to juggling asks from leadership, their own plans, and requests from other teams. Step 4 is all about helping teams prioritize so final plans are focused and achievable. For this step to be effective, it’s essential to have some way of tracking requests and dependencies during the planning process. Too often, we see this happen too late and teams have to re-prioritize because they hadn’t accounted for asks from other teams, wasting precious time. See our Tutorial for Planning & OKRs for step-by-step guidance on how to do this in Coda, or try out our Timeline with dependencies template. It’s normal for this step to feel a little chaotic, and it requires tough decisions on what to cut. Make sure your leadership team is available to settle any prioritization conflicts using bullpen-style meetings to efficiently work through issues.Step 5: Make sure everyone knows the plan.
Planning should have a defined end point where planning ends and execution begins. This transition should be marked by sharing the plans with everyone across the company. We’re fans of having each team present a very high-level view of their goals to the entire company, with a team OKRs writeup that connects to a more detailed centralized OKR doc. Keep these presentations succinct, clarify the “why” behind the “what,” and record them for future reference. Learn how to run OKR presentations in the Coda Tutorial for Planning & OKRs.Congratulate yourself on a successful process.
When you follow these five steps, you should have a planning process that’s efficient, effective, and easy to follow. Processes are also meant to evolve, so once you’ve run the planning cycle, we recommend going back to Step 1 and reflecting on what went well and what you want to iterate on next time. If you’d like more insights, tips, and templates for optimizing your planning, Coda Head of Engineering Oliver Heckmann has created The Ultimate Coda Handbook for Planning & OKRs to help you out.Related posts
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