Annual Planning Process
Designs the process before the plan, since most planning failures are process failures rather than analytical ones.
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Running it, start to finish
- Name the plan's primary purpose before designing the process.
- Publish constraints before teams start planning.
- Hold an explicit forum for deciding what gets dropped.
What you get back
The output this produces, every time.
- Sequences top-down direction before bottom-up planning, with an explicit reconciliation step.
- Requires constraints to be shared before teams plan, which prevents a whole round of rework.
- Designs the forum where trade-offs are actually decided rather than deferred to reality.
Getting better results
Where this usually goes wrong, and how to avoid it.
- Give constraints upfront. Teams planning without knowing headcount and budget produce work that is thrown away, and they notice.
- Include what is not being done. It is the most useful line in any plan and the one most consistently left out.
- Do not involve everyone at every stage. It is the most common process failure, producing a long cycle and decisions diluted to the point of meaninglessness.
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Written for The AI University. Every prompt in this library is original work — authored, tested and revised here, not collected from elsewhere. 365 of them, free with an account.