Annual Planning Meeting
Run Day 1 and Day 2 of the Annual Planning Meeting with Ninety.
Table of Contents
Prepping for an Annual Planning Meeting
Before running your Annual Planning Meeting, there are items within Ninety that users should prepare in advance. While the Quarterly and Annual Planning Meeting work similarly to the Weekly Team Meeting in that they are integrated with the other Ninety tools, cleaning and reviewing your information before Day 1 saves your team valuable time.
Tip: Create To-Dos for your team to prepare.
Customize Your Annual Planning Meeting Agenda
One way to prepare for your Annual Planning Meeting is to customize your agenda.
While your account comes with standard Weekly, Quarterly, Annual, Focus Day, and Vision building agendas; section changes, and custom additions help cater the tools to fit your team's needs. The Team Health sections, for example, only include a few pointers on the section's intention. A suggestion is to customize the agenda so that the default Team Health section is a much shorter period of time, allowing your team a brief overview before diving into a custom Team Health section where you can embed a shareable link to your group's chosen team building tool.
Additional suggestions for custom sections may include a shareable link to your team's CRM data, or even a slide deck on your team's growth model. Learn more about customizing your meeting agenda.
Rocks
Since a Quarterly Planning Meeting is essentially built into the Annual Planning Meeting, all team members should come to the meeting prepared to review their current Rocks, and create new ones for the following quarter. All Rock information should be up to date, including status, details, and any additional comments to aid in explaining the Rock's(in)completion. Predetermined Rocks for the following quarters should be listed on the Long-Term Issues and prioritized along with the incomplete portions of any current Rocks.
Issues
Ideally, the Short-Term Issues list should be reviewed during the last Weekly Team Meeting of your quarter so that any relevant Short-Term Issues are moved to the Long-Term Issues list. Additionally, all participating Annual Planning Meeting members should think through, add to, and edit your team's Long-Term Issues list prior to the session.
During this time, Rock candidates and the most relevant Long-Term Issues should be prioritized to Issues that may no longer be relevant move toward the bottom or get archived. Similar Issues can now be merged together so that they can be better prioritized.
SWOT
If this is your team's first Annual Planning Meeting, the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) portion of your Vision page may not yet contain any information. If this is the case, a large portion of the SWOT section in your agenda is dedicated to creating this analysis.
Prior to the session, your team would benefit from an overview of what a SWOT is and how it is used. It may also be helpful for each team member to come to the meeting having populated a single strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat, or having assigned a single individual to each of the four sections.
If your team has already created a SWOT analysis, having a To-Do for each team member to review the existing version and add any new items they think may be relevant will ensure everyone is already on the same page once the meeting begins. Links to outside resources and articles relating to your team's SWOT can be added in a custom section before or after the SWOT portion.
Test Run
To ensure a smooth Annual Planning Meeting without technical difficulties, the facilitator and/or scribe should start and attempt to run a mock Annual Planning Meeting in Ninety once the agenda is complete.
Not only does this help familiarize you with the software, but it also helps identify any concerns with the customized agenda.
Run an Annual Planning Meeting
Starting Day 1
When a user starts a new meeting, Day 1 is activated by default. The meeting runs similarly to the Quarterly Planning Meeting and the Weekly Team Meeting with a few additional sections. Additional sections include but may not be limited to,
- Team Health
- 9 Core Competencies Review
- SWOT Analysis
- Vision Review
- 3-Year Goals
Upon completing Day 1, no recap email is sent, and no ratings are taken.
Tip: The APM Recap/Ratings are covered after Day 2.
Starting Day 2
After clicking Finish on Day 1, Ninety reverts to the Meetings page with a prompt to start Day 2 in the Active Annual Planning Meetings area.
Don't forget that the SWOT is visible in the Vision outside the APM.
The Facilitator for the APM Day 2 follows the following format,
- Objectives: provide an overview of the outcomes expected from the day's meeting.
- Check-In: reflect on Day 1 and resolve any remaining concerns.
- 3-Year Goals: recap any new or updated 3-Year Goals.
- 1-Year Goals: brainstorm, condense, and elect 1-Year Goals.
- 90-Day Goals: ideate the SMART Rocks needed to win the next quarter.
- Long-Term Issue: raise, discuss, and resolve (RDR) the Issues affecting the next year.
- Next Steps: review the To-Dos created throughout the day.
- Conclude: share the major takeaways from the day and rate the meeting.
After the APM
After all the accomplishments from the APM, we recommend planning a State of the Company meeting within two weeks to share the updated Vision with the entire organization. The APM is a crucial piece of the puzzle to keep organizations focused, aligned, and thriving.