The traditional annual planning process is exactly what it sounds like. It is a massive, once-a-year event that usually starts halfway through the prior year. Organizations spend five to six months gathering data, polishing presentations, and navigating successive levels of management just to get a crack at the budget. So why is traditional annual planning ineffective for modern businesses?
By the time the fiscal year begins in November, the world has changed. One executive at a large financial institution noted that by the end of the first quarter, half of what they planned to do had been abandoned, and half of what they were doing wasn't even in the initial plan.
If annual planning is too slow, many assume the answer is continuous planning. In an organization of any significant size, that is a fever dream. It takes time to communicate strategy and coordinate activities across complex business units and various data silos.
The sweet spot for strategic alignment is quarterly planning. This rhythm gives your teams enough time to execute and see results without waiting an entire year to pivot.
People in most organizations claim they do quarterly reviews, but they are usually just doing status updates to see how the annual plan is going. To stay ahead of competition, you must shift the culture. A quarterly review should be a steering event where you have the courage to:
Reallocate resources and people based on real-time results.
Alter the plan's direction to account for market shifts.
Kill projects that are no longer delivering value.
The biggest barrier to this agility is the data call—the weeks spent chasing spreadsheets and slide decks. This is where a leading strategic portfolio management (SPM) solution like Clarity® by Broadcom changes the game. (Find out why Broadcom was named a leader and outperformer in the GigaOm Radar for Agile Planning and Portfolio Management.)
How can SPM solutions improve business agility? When your investments and activities are managed in a centralized system, generating the review deck is simply a matter of running a report.
Technology alone won't fix a broken process, but it does take away the excuse that you don't have the data to act. Real transformation requires the courage to move from muddling along to a model in which every dollar of discretionary innovation spending is tied to a current, visible roadmap.
It is a slow, five-month marathon that often produces results that are already out-of-date by the time the fiscal year begins.
No, because the complexity of communicating strategy across large business units makes constant, continuous changes unrealistic for most.
Clarity centralizes investments and activities, allowing teams to generate review decks instantly rather than spending weeks chasing spreadsheets.
Leadership should move beyond status updates to reallocate resources, alter directions, and kill projects that no longer deliver value.