Quarterly Planning Template

You’re coming up on the end of the quarter, which includes navigating the chaos of competing priorities, limited resources, ambiguous accountability, and an overall lack of inter-team coherency.

To wrangle that chaos and drive a successful quarter, you need to take a step back. It’s time to realign teams around real business impact and create a unified framework teams can use to both plan and execute projects.

Transparent communication, accountability, and enhanced collaboration tools are the key to making this work — which is why you need a quarterly planning template.

What is quarterly planning?

Quarterly planning takes the company’s annual roadmap and breaks it down into four far more manageable chunks of time. This makes it easier for teams to identify priorities, adapt to shifting circumstances, and iterate effectively as they work towards the company’s strategic objectives.  A good quarterly plan identifies which projects need to be completed in the next three months in order to make a short-term impact on long-term goals.

The benefits of our quarterly business plan template

Quarterly planning involves working with a lot of different people with a lot of different — often competing — priorities. Open communication and effective collaboration are critical, but not always easy. Our quarterly action plan template overcomes that obstacle by giving teams the visibility needed to streamline strategy and execution.

Streamline your quarterly planning

This quarterly planning template is designed to simplify the quarterly planning process. It helps teams focus on execution and results by providing a structured approach. With its features tailored to enhance visibility and coordination, the template will help ensure that all projects align with both quarterly and annual strategic objectives. By using this tool throughout the quarter, teams can efficiently track progress toward their goals and stay focused on driving the business forward.

Prioritize for impact

Effective planning requires a clear understanding of each project’s potential impact on the business. This plan template allows teams to organize and prioritize projects based on their potential to advance business goals. It also makes resource allocation more efficient by directing efforts where they’re needed most. By focusing on key areas, such as quarterly goals, teams can make informed decisions to achieve better outcomes every quarter.

Understand the effort

While a project might seem beneficial, it’s essential to understand the work that will go into it. This template includes dedicated fields to capture input from team members about required resources and effort. This feature not only helps weigh the pros and cons of each project but also provides clarity during quarterly planning meetings to ensure alignment across the team.

Comprehensive progress tracking

Monitoring progress throughout the quarter is vital, and this quarterly planning template makes it easier to track progress at every stage. By keeping a pulse on quarterly goals and focus areas, teams can align on next steps and address challenges in real time. With detailed tracking capabilities, such as project status, priorities, and ownership, this template will keep top-of-mind tasks and priorities moving forward effectively. This resource can easily complement an action plan template to ensure accountability and clear insights for the next quarter or even the following quarterly planning meeting.

What should be included in a quarterly action plan?

The ultimate answer to “what should be included in my quarterly plan?” is: whatever your team needs to effectively align on strategic priorities, allocate resources, and track progress. Your project management method will determine several components of your quarterly planning template, but these four are foundational.

1. Success metrics

There are many different metrics and methods you can use to measure success. Objectives and key results (OKRs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) are two of the most popular methods. Make sure your own success metrics are clearly stated and easily accessible in your quarterly plan so that your team can stay aligned while both planning and tracking progress.

2. Ownership

Ownership is essential to tracking progress, since it enforces accountability and streamlines communication once a project kicks off. “Owner” should be one of the first fields in your quarterly planning template, but you can also use multiple “People” fields to define other important roles. (For example, if you used the RACI method, you might have fields to define who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.)

3. Estimated effort

When you’re planning and prioritizing projects for the quarter, one of the most important pieces of data is the amount of effort the project will take in terms of time and resources. Agile project managers use a story point system, but whatever method you use, make sure that effort and/or resource estimates are top of mind and highly visible in your quarterly business plan template. 

4. Timelines

Last but not least, your template must include detailed information about the project’s timelines. A few key fields to include are:

• Start and end dates
• Milestones (events and/or deliverables)
• Dependencies (for other tasks and projects)

If your team uses an Agile approach, you should also include the scheduled sprint(s).

4 best practices for your quarterly work plan template

Now that you’ve designed an A+ quarterly planning template, it’s time to start using it. Your template is the headquarters for your quarterly planning, and now you need to invite the people who will staff it. Communication is the key to success here, and these are four critically important communication best practices to follow.

1. Engage stakeholders early

Don’t wait until halfway through your planning before you engage senior and cross-department stakeholders. This is a group effort, so communicate openly, invite feedback (don’t just accept it), and actively listen to those with different perspectives. Add key stakeholders to your quarterly planning template so their feedback is centralized, then create a special Slack channel where all stakeholders can collaborate more conveniently and transparently.

2. Define success clearly 

Take time to discuss and define what “success” means for each project on your quarterly plan. Be as specific as you can and make sure all your key stakeholders are comfortable with the definition of success, and willing to commit to it. This extra upfront effort will save you a lot of headaches at the end of the quarter. Add a text field to your quarterly plan template to clearly spell out what “done” means, so that it’s always front and center. 

 3. Encourage transparency at every level

Transparency creates accountability and results in critically important insights that could have been missed. Give visibility to the team members who are going to be doing the legwork and not just strategic stakeholders. They’ll be able to offer you a more realistic opinion on the effort and resources a project requires. This alignment will make everything run much more smoothly when it’s time to start implementing your plan.

4. Plan quarterly, communicate regularly

A quarter is a long time. And even though you have milestones, stakeholder insight and collaboration isn’t only valuable at the planning stage. It’s not realistic to hold regular check-in meetings with a lot of different stakeholders, but project-based Slack channels allow everyone to be aligned on progress and available to help when roadblocks emerge. You can even add the message links for key discussions to your quarterly work plan template so you can quickly refer back to them. A shared project task list will also help you implement more strategic communication.