Planning in Align

Annual and quarterly planning is the foundation of effective execution and goal alignment for your team. Use this step-by-step guide to help you maximize the value of Align.

3 Steps to Successful Planning

Planning Prep: Set the Stage for Success

Great planning starts with great preparation. The foundation of effective annual or quarterly planning is ensuring you have a clear picture of where you stand before you decide where to go next. The best companies keep their data up to date throughout the quarter with daily and weekly huddles, allowing for more accurate and informed planning when it’s time to reflect and strategize. By gathering insights, analyzing performance, and ensuring alignment across your team, you create a strong starting point for Planning Day.

When should this happen?
Start your preparation at least two to three weeks before your Planning Day. This gives you enough time to review data, gather feedback, and involve every team member in the process. Preparation ensures that your Planning Day runs smoothly and productively, setting your team up for success in the coming quarter.

Why is it important?
Without proper preparation, planning can feel rushed, incomplete, and disconnected from your team’s day-to-day realities. Reflecting on past performance and updating your strategic inputs allows your team to focus on what’s most important for the future, aligning everyone on shared goals and priorities. Preparation also encourages team buy-in by involving every person in the process, making your strategic plan a shared roadmap rather than a top-down directive.

Steps to Prepare for Planning Day

1. Review Past Performance

The first step in planning prep is taking an honest and thorough look at your results from the past quarter:

  • Priorities: Were last quarter’s priorities achieved? If not, why? Consider personal, team, and company-level priorities. Should they be carried over to next quarter?
  • Critical Numbers and KPIs: Did you meet the numbers that matter most? If not, were the targets set too high? Could you have done more? Look at financial metrics, operational KPIs, and other performance indicators and talk about how they are connected to Priority and Annual initiative performance
  • Annual Initiatives: Are you on track to achieve your annual goals? If not, what needs to change? If you did, what was the impact on the business? Should any initiatives carry over into the next quarter?

Taking the time to analyze these areas ensures you understand what worked, what didn’t, and why.

3 Questions to Ask Yourself:

  • What were the key successes from the last quarter, and what factors contributed to them?
  • What obstacles or challenges kept you from achieving certain goals?
  • What lessons can you take into the next quarter to improve execution and focus?

These questions help you prepare for constructive conversations with your team on Planning Day and ensure that your strategy reflects the realities of your business.

2. Gather Team Insights

Use tools like the Alignment Survey to collect feedback from your team on strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. These insights can highlight disconnects or bottlenecks that need attention in the upcoming quarter. Engaging your team in this process fosters collaboration and helps surface valuable perspectives from every level of the company.

Ask each team member to create 3-5 Priorities they believe are necessary to keep the company growing and on track.  Make sure those priorities are outcome oriented thinking about where will you be at the end of next quarter.

3. Update Data and Priorities

Review and update your data in Align so everything is current and ready to guide your planning discussions. This includes:

  • Critical Numbers and Key performance indicators (KPIs)
  • Tasks
  • Individual and team priorities

Keeping your data fresh and accurate throughout the quarter with daily and weekly huddles simplifies this step and ensures your team is always aligned on progress and accountability.

Planning Day: Build Your Roadmap

Planning Day is your opportunity to step out of the day-to-day grind and focus on your business. It’s the time to align your team on the big-picture priorities and initiatives that will drive your company forward in the year and quarter ahead. By leveraging Align’s tools and features, you can turn abstract strategy into a clear, actionable roadmap that keeps everyone moving in the same direction.

Why is it important?
The outcome of Planning Day should be complete alignment across your team on what must happen to achieve your company’s most critical goals. This alignment creates clarity and focus, ensuring everyone knows where the company is heading and how their work contributes to success. Without it, teams can easily fall into the trap of working on the wrong priorities, wasting time and resources.

When should this happen?
Schedule Planning Day at the end of a quarter or fiscal year, after you’ve had time to complete your preparation. This ensures that your team is working with accurate data and insights to guide discussions.

Steps to Make the most of Planning Day

1. Review and Revise Your One Page Strategic Plan (OPSP)

The OPSP is your company’s roadmap, and Planning Day is the perfect time to revisit it. Use the OPSP Wizard in Align to guide your team through each section, ensuring it reflects your current goals and market conditions.

Consider focusing on one specific area of the OPSP that could benefit from deeper discussion and refinement, such as:

  • Core Values: Are they still driving your culture and decision-making?
  • Brand Promise: Does it resonate with your market and differentiate you from competitors?
  • SWOT Analysis: Have new opportunities or threats emerged that you need to address?

Revisiting these foundational elements sets the stage for determining your Annual Initiatives and Company Priorities.

2. Set Annual Initiatives and Critical Numbers

Annual Initiatives represent the major projects and goals that will drive your company’s success over the next year. During Planning Day, your team should align on:

  • What success looks like for the year
  • The key results (Critical Numbers) you must achieve to hit your targets

Use Align’s Initiatives and Critical Numbers tools to document these decisions in real time. Having everything in one place ensures clarity and accountability across the team.

3. Define Quarterly Company Priorities

With your Annual Initiatives in place, determine the Company Priorities for the upcoming quarter that will move you closer to your long-term goals. Remember, Planning Day is about the big picture—the details of how these priorities will be executed come later when cascading them into individual and team priorities.

Use Align to:

  • Organize your priorities in the platform
  • Assign owners to each priority to ensure accountability
  • Visualize how each priority aligns with your Annual Initiatives

4. Drive Alignment Across the Team

The ultimate goal of Planning Day is full team alignment. By the end of the day, every person should understand:

  • The company’s direction and focus
  • The major goals for the year and quarter
  • Their role in achieving those goals

Align’s visual dashboards and collaboration features make it easy to keep everyone on the same page, both during and after Planning Day.

Next Quarter Prep: Turn Strategy into Action

The best plans are only as effective as their execution. Once your company priorities and Annual Initiatives are defined, the focus shifts to cascading those goals into actionable plans for the quarter ahead. This step ensures alignment from the company level down to individual contributors, creating clarity and accountability across the team.

Why is it important?
Next Quarter Prep bridges the gap between strategy and execution. It’s about ensuring that every team member understands their role in achieving the company’s goals while balancing their daily responsibilities. Proper preparation sets the stage for a productive quarter by fostering alignment, focus, and accountability.

When should this happen?
Next Quarter Prep should happen immediately after Planning Day to maintain momentum and clarity. This process is most effective when everyone is fresh from the strategic conversations and ready to focus on their specific contributions.

Steps for Preparing the Next Quarter

1. Cascade Initiatives

Company-wide priorities must align with and support your Annual Initiatives. Cascading priorities ensures that every level of the organization is working toward shared goals. Here’s how:

  • Break down Company Priorities into actionable team and individual priorities. Use Align’s Priority Drawer to directly connect company and individual priorities with Annual Initiatives for clarity.
  • Ensure each team member has no more than three priorities for the quarter. This keeps the focus sharp and manageable.
  • Check out the Priorities page in the Align Academy for additional tips and best practices to streamline this process.

2. Define Clear Priorities

Clear, well-defined priorities provide the focus needed for effective execution. Use these tips to refine priorities:

  • Collaborate with a colleague: Pair up with a teammate to discuss the priority’s purpose, expected impact, and path to success. This process can spark new ideas and refine focus.
  • Manager review: Managers should ensure team priorities collectively drive the company forward while balancing individual workloads. They should also review the Scorecard Metrics to ensure time and resources are allocated effectively between on the business and in the business work.

By clearly defining and reviewing priorities, you create a framework that aligns everyone’s efforts with the company’s larger goals.

3. Leverage AI

Technology can take your planning process to the next level. Use Align’s AI Priority Coach and KPI Suggestions to generate draft priorities and KPIs that inspire creativity and action.

  • Priorities: Remember, priorities should be written as “lagging” goals—what success will look like at the end of the quarter.
  • KPIs: Include a mix of lagging and leading indicators. Leading KPIs inspire action throughout the quarter to ensure priorities and Critical Numbers are achieved.

Align’s AI tools streamline this process and help you create priorities that are both ambitious and actionable.

How does this fit into your process? 

Come to Ask Align and talk to our Advisors!  These free advising sessions can focus on technical questions about the software or advice based on the best practices and tips we’ve learned from hundreds of clients.  Will we see you there?