Planning done well is not a once-and-done event. It requires careful research and thoughtfulness. Starting early and spreading it over the calendar is crucial. Planning is actually a year-round endeavor… and that’s a good thing because it means that you don’t have to have the stress of trying to do it all at once. In our experience, when planning is spread out over time, the end result is almost always better than a plan done under the pain of a looming deadline. With that in mind, here is a suggested planning calendar for midsized firms with small to medium-sized leadership teams that you can use, no matter what time of year you start…


Strategic Planning
June: Hold a 6-hour strategic visioning session. List and dream about the big strategic changes you may want to implement in the following year. Assign a champion to each one to write the business case.
September: Full-day strategic session where champions present their business cases (developed with other leaders in the firm as needed) and the executive leadership team debates and chooses likely winners and losers.
November: Finalize your plan now… that way implementation can begin almost immediately instead of waiting until February!
(Note: There may well be other meetings between June and September with a different participant mix to help develop, research, and refine the business cases.)


Operational Planning
Mid-October: Four-hour operational planning session, where the company outlines its intentions/direction for the following year, reconfirms the strategic shifts planned, and the team talks about resource availability estimates.
Mid-November: Full-day operational planning session, where each function presents its detailed plans, they are debated and synchronized, and a near-final plan nearly complete.
Mid-December: Four-hour final operational planning session where the plan set is locked down and the company presentation is planned for early January.

Create a Repository for Your Best Thinking
As a result of your work and that of your team, your company will begin to accumulate a significant amount of data points and detail. It is important that you systematically record objectives and strategies in a useful format that allows for tracking against the plan. The cloud-based One Page Planning and Performance System allows your team’s plans to visible in real-time, facilitates remote work, and provides a tracking module that keeps you on target thought the entire year.