Annual planning is an important part of helping your company grow, increase productivity, and make more money.

In this blog post, we share eight easy-to-use templates that can make your planning sessions more efficient and effective. 

Annual retrospective

Before diving into developing a plan for the coming year, you might want to look at the work you did in the previous year. An annual retrospective gives you the opportunity to analyze your past wins and losses. Understanding what made you successful in the previous year and what went wrong can help you to identify needed process changes or determine which projects to drop. 

This annual retrospective template makes it easy for you to look at what went right and what could have been improved in the previous year and helps you to make an action plan for the coming year.

2023 annual calendar

This simple 2023 calendar template allows you to easily add important dates for projects, deadlines, and milestones. Anybody who has access to the calendar can add pertinent information, helping keep your team informed and on track.

OKR planning

Objectives and key results (OKR) planning is a framework for setting goals, or objectives, for individuals, teams, and organizations. The framework lets you set aggressive goals and then measure the outcome (the key results) of each.

This OKR planning template lets you work collaboratively with team members to brainstorm the OKR objectives you want to meet. Then you can define the key results you expect from these OKRs and the measure you will use to track them. Organize and categorize the key results and align them with the corresponding objectives.

Planning template

The planning template is designed for big room planning—an agile planning method that brings together teams and stakeholders for a large planning session. The idea is to align all teams and stakeholders on business goals so they can plan the work that needs to be done in the next period.

In distributed organizations, it can be difficult to bring everybody together in one large room. The Lucidspark planning template lets you bring everybody together virtually to share ideas and align team and individual work with corporate goals and defined milestones.

Pro tip: Use Breakout Boards to break teams into smaller groups to help you to tackle more complex ideas and problems. Then you can bring everybody back to share ideas and adopt a path forward. 

Outcome-based roadmap

An outcome-based roadmap focuses on specific outcomes instead of focusing on the features. 

Use this outcome-based roadmap template to determine what types of outcomes you want such as developing new functionality that adds value for a specific segment of customers. Then define the steps that need to be done to achieve those outcomes.

Action plan

Action plans list the steps and tasks that need to be done to achieve defined goals. They generally include a description of the goal you want to reach, the people responsible for each step or task, milestones and deadlines, the resources you’ll need to complete the tasks, and the measure you’ll use to evaluate your progress.

This action plan template lets you easily collaborate on and create an action plan in a virtual environment. Then you can track your progress as you work through the list.

Strategic planning

Strategic planning focuses more on the long-term direction of your company or organization. In a strategic planning session, you identify the goals that will help you to move in that direction. 

Use the Lucidspark strategic planning template to help you:

• Determine the problems and opportunities you want to address.
• Set goals that align with those problems and opportunities.
• Assess your current capabilities.
• Define the actions that need to be taken to reach those goals.
• Determine what initiatives you need to work on to complete the actions.

Strategy map   

This strategic map template provides a visual overview of the things that a company needs to do in four areas (or perspectives) to achieve long-term corporate strategic goals. The four areas are finance, customer, internal processes, and learning and growth.