Annual Work Planning: Putting your strategy into action →

2021 is creeping up on us, which means it’s planning season!  Planning runs the gamut - from individual work plans to department plans to project-level plans to budgets - so it’s a busy time of year. You can make your planning more effective  and strategic by starting out with taking a big picture view of the year ahead.

Here we explain why organizational annual work plans matter and how you can go about developing one.

Why have an annual work plan?

At a high level, it helps answer fundamental questions such as: “How are we doing? Are we making progress? Where are we succeeding and where are we behind?” 

• Ensure the work you’re doing is aligned with your strategic goals, going beyond just activities and task lists

• Give your entire organization a framework for achieving impact and results

• Equip your leadership team, including your board, with a simple and easy-to-read tool to track your team’s work and progress

• Help everyone see how their work and efforts amount to something much greater - achieving your strategic goals.

Getting Started: Take a top-down approach

It’s easy to get lost in ‘activity’ level planning. This level of detail is essential at some point, but can distract an organization from focusing on what it really needs and wants to achieve - its strategic goals. So we recommend taking a step back from project-level work plans and instead use a ‘top-down’ approach to planning. 

Step One: Get Informed

Just like in any workshop, you want to ensure every voice gets heard. When facilitating online, there are different ways to do this:

• Your strategic plan

• Forecasted budgets (if you don’t have these yet, use past budgets for estimates)

• All current and expected project contracts & requirements (deliverables, timelines, etc.)

• M&E plans (to draw targets and indicators).

• Project proposals (that are likely to be successful)

• A calendar for the coming year (key dates and events)

Step Two: Dream Big

Before you look at what you ‘have to do’ or what you’ve always done, take a moment with your team to do some ‘blue sky thinking.’ Ask yourself this: 

• If money weren’t an issue, what would we want to highlight we achieved in our 2021 annual report?

  • Discuss creative ideas as a team and determine if any of them could actually play out in reality...you’d be surprised!

Step Three: Get Strategic

Goals: What are your strategic goals and of those, what do you want to achieve, or make progress towards, in 2021?

Step Four: Get Grounded

• Activities: To achieve those goals, what activities or interventions are needed? (Here’s where some of your project-level work can be incorporated into your work plan - you’ve likely committed to activities and deliverables and so what strategic goals are those activities helping to achieve?)

• Outcomes: What is your intended result in carrying out these activities? What do you want to accomplish?

• Responsible: Who is accountable for the different deliverables?

• Timing: What are your deadlines?

• Budget: What budget - if any - do you have for this work?

Here’s a short video that explains a planning method we use at Maliasili called “RACI” (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed), which might be a valuable tool to incorporate into your planning processes.

Step Five: Put it all together

Here you’ll want to put your goals and action points together into one framework. At Maliasili we use Excel, but others might use an online planning tool. Choose what works for you, but make sure that it’s simple and easy to update and scan through.

Maliasili has a work planning tool template you can download and tailor to meet your organization’s needs.

Top Tips:

• Annual work plans should be ambitious but realistic, and therefore work plans need to be linked to the resources available while also considering activities that should get done and that need to be resourced.

• The best work plans identify the top 3 or 5 high-level targets that the organization would like to achieve to demonstrate impact/success. They are not a laundry list of “wants”.

• Review and update your annual work plan at least every quarter.

• Use color coding so that one can easily glance through the work plan and see where things stand (e.g. red for “delayed,” yellow for “slightly off track,” green for “complete.”

• Share your work plan with your board and with donors - these audiences don’t want or need to get into your detailed project-level work plans, but instead this will give them a big picture idea of what you want to achieve.

• Identify someone on the team to ‘own’ the plan and the planning process.

Read the full newsletter here: Maliasili Reader Issue 9

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