Annual Planning

Annual planning is useful for coordinating across a multi-threaded company and forcing leaders to take stock of where they are going¹. When conducting a technical organization’s annual planning, use the time to understand where your company and department are at, where your company wants to go, and how your department gets your company there. Lena Reinhard provides a template for this planning². After the plan is developed, take the department along by first sharing in a meeting with all managers. Follow by sharing it with your department and broader stakeholders.

Annual planning seeks to do a lot (leadership buy in, roadmapping, headcount planning, etc.), and by seeking to a do lot, it fails to do one thing well. Try to break apart and solve for each one individually¹.

Tips

1. Try to get planning done before the year starts. Knowing high priority objectives for early in the year can help this².
2. Include your direct reports early in the process²
3. Leave room for adjustments based on external and internal parties²
4. Do not introduce new things, the rush of the yearly plan results in shallow planning for new things. New things require budget, buy-in, coordination that the yearly process does not lend itself to¹.
   1. Minimize dependencies by focusing on building on what exists (avoid introducing new things)¹ .
5. De-couple headcount planning from this process to avoid the incentives of headcount from corrupting the planning process¹.
6. Bottom up planning process do not work because teams do not have the perspective of other teams, additionally they are unlikely to understand what other teams will have to do to accomplish a task. Finally, this sets a floor for their expectations¹.

Develop Frameworks and constraints for prioritization

Frameworks themselves can introduce constraints, some prioritization frameworks¹:

• Even Overs
• Investment portfolio: “Let’s allocate 20% effort to keeping the lights on, 20% to moonshots, etc.”
• Capabilities model

Make sure that you account for the keeping the lights on work and other (non-obvious) constraints¹.

Communication

In rolling out the plan, hit these communication points²:

What is the corporate strategy? What is our engineering vision (what does the team look like by x date)? What is our engineering strategy (the why behind the what)? Investments in delivery, tech, organization, teams, and people

Tips

• Anticipate the “what does this mean for me?” question²
• Continue to discuss and share the strategy throughout the year²

References