A plan for the year, moved 90 days at a time

A plan for the year is worth writing because it makes you choose. A year is long enough to change something real about the business: a new service, a second location, a steadier mix of customers. But a year is too long to steer by. In January, December is abstract, and by June the plan is a document nobody has opened since it was written.

The answer is two horizons: a direction for the year, and priorities for the next 90 days.

The year: a few objectives, each with a measure

Start with where you want the business to be in twelve months, written as a few objectives. Three is plenty. With more than five, none of them gets the attention it needs.

Each objective needs a measure and a date, so you will know whether you got there: recurring revenue at a level you name, a second crew trained and working, no single customer above a share of revenue you set. If you cannot say how you would know, it is a wish, not an objective.

This is one of the most studied ideas in management. Reviewing 35 years of goal-setting research, Edwin Locke and Gary Latham reported that specific, difficult goals led to higher performance than simply telling people to do their best. A measure and a date are what make a goal specific.

The 90 days: a few priorities, each with an owner

Then ask what has to happen in the next 90 days to move each objective. Those are your priorities, and each one gets three things:

• An owner. One person, by name. Shared ownership is how a priority ends up owned by nobody.
• A start and a due date. Both inside the 90 days.
• Milestones. Two or three points along the way, so you can see by week three whether it is on pace, not by week twelve.

Keep the list short enough to fit on one page. A priority list that includes everything has stopped being a priority list.

Review it every month, replan it every quarter

The plan moves in the monthly review: which priorities advanced, which are behind their pace, and what decision would get them moving. A priority that is behind is not a failure. It is information, and the earlier you see it, the easier it is to act on.

That monthly look is not a formality. Locke and Latham found that for goals to be effective, people need feedback that shows their progress toward the goal. Without it, adjusting the effort or the approach is difficult or impossible. And a review of 138 experiments found that monitoring progress helped people reach their goals, and helped more when the progress was physically recorded or reported to others. A plan reviewed on a set day, with progress written down against each priority, is that finding put to work.

Every 90 days, step back. Close out what is done, carry over what still matters, drop what no longer does, and set the next 90 days against the year's objectives. Once a year, ask whether the objectives themselves still point the right way.

What you learn along the way

Run this for a few quarters and the plan teaches you things about your business that are hard to see any other way. You learn where your own time actually goes, which work only moves when you push it, and which priorities you keep carrying over because something in the way the business runs is in the way. Finding that system, and fixing it, is often the most useful result of the whole exercise.

The quarterly step back is also where the world outside comes in: a customer's plans, a competitor's move, a supplier's prices, a change in the rules you work under. A plan that is reviewed every 90 days can take those in while there is still time to respond.

Where Standing Proof helps

In the workspace, the Plan holds the year's objectives, each with its measure and date, and the initiatives that serve them, each with an owner, dates, milestones and progress. It shows where the plan stands, and what is due, overdue or behind this week, so the monthly review starts from the plan itself rather than from memory.

With EPS, the plan for the year and the 90-day priorities are built with you after the EVA™ capability assessment, and kept moving with you every month.

Sources

• Locke, E. A., and Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717.
• Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., and others (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198–229.