Plans: What are they and how do you create them?
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Plans are where you'll set up each group of OKRs that you set. Whether you're setting up company-level OKRs, department-level OKRs, or team-level OKRs, you'll want a new plan for each set of OKRs. This gives you an easier way of managing and tracking just the OKRs that are important for your team.
An easy way to think about this is that each plan should house the OKRs for whateve rteam would have a meeting about that group of OKRs. So if the senior leadership team would only talk about the company-level OKRs, those should be all of the OKRs you put in one plan.
You'll likely have a top-level plan for your whole company-- the OKRs that will push the company forward this quarter. Supporting those top-level OKRs will be department or team specific OKRs. To show that hierarchy, we'll set up the Company OKRs plan first. Then, we can create sub-plans (located at the bottom of the plan dashboard) for each of the departments or team.
The sub-plans will show in the Strategy Map, but otherwise will function wholly as a regular plan. The outcomes of your sub-plans won't affect the top-level plan and serve just as a visual reminder of how the goals are structured.
When creating a plan, we encourage you to include the following in the plan title:
The team working on the plan
The quarter and year the plan is for
This will help with searching for previous plans and choosing the correct plan when building dashboards. A good plan title would look like: "Customer Success Q3 2024 OKRs"
We also recommend setting your plan to weekly check-ins. This ensures that you don't miss any critical updates that could affect the progress on your key results. That said, some teams (particularly in Engineering and Product) tend to work in 2 week sprints and should feel open to setting their check-ins to bi-weekly.
We always recommend using quarters for your goals instead of longer timelines to ensure that your priorities don't change midcycle. This also gives your team an easy timeline to work with where they won't burn out on keeping goals updated.
Once you've chosen your structure for your plans, you can see how they relate to one another using our Strategy Map:
The Strategy Map is only available on Plus and Premium plans
The Cascading Map is only available on Premium plans