Saving you from Quarterly Planning - Part 1
What’s wrong with big batch planning, and how to undo it.
As someone with extensive experience in planning and facilitating 'big room' and 'PI planning' events, I've seen far too many of these sessions fall short of delivering real value. My clients hire me to ensure consistent, high-quality results, so I couldn't simply accept that we had to keep up this big batch planning practice. I was determined to address these issues head-on, and that's exactly what I did.
In this multi-part blog series, I'll delve into the problems inherent in big batch quarterly planning, drawing from my challenging experience at two of Australia's largest banks, as well as other large corporations. I'll also highlight the common pitfalls you should avoid and the tangible benefits you can reap, including significant time savings and the early delivery of value. Along the way, I'll share valuable recommendations for dismantling your own costly planning events. Let's begin this planning revolution together.
Issues with Quarterly Planning
Effort
There’s a lot of effort involved in preparing for quarterly planning, although most processes claim that a two-day event should be used for this process, I normally see teams attempting to increase their planning quality and spending too much time before the event, and then treat the event itself as an exercise in going through the motions.
Uncertainty and expectation
There’s an expectation that the plans created during these events are accurate and provide three months of certainty. They don’t typically take into account that work about to start is quite certain, but work a few months out is quite uncertain. The level of uncertainty across the entire planning horizon is expected to be consistent, and the reality is experienced with disappointment three months later when plans are not achieved.
Lowballing
The teams perceiving the disappointment begin to water their plans down so they don’t overcommit. A sense of “pleasing managers” creeps in and overtakes the team’s ambition, this negative dynamic breeds widespread mediocrity in teams and their delivery.
Dependencies
As dependencies are usually given a lot of air time at these events, teams tend to leave dependency discussion to occur over just these two days, it hampers the real collaboration that needs to happen around dependencies continuously in order to navigate them successfully.
Lack of Quality planning time
Even if preparation waste is experienced, teams rarely have had enough quality time to prepare for the planning event, so they attend without a strong understanding of what they’re trying to achieve, what goals they have or what features they should be building. They haven’t been able to consider both technical and business aspects because the upfront effort has not had engagement by other people, who are likely waiting for quarterly planning to address these matters. Collaboration is often deferred to a 3-month boundary, but it can't be a one-time event. We need more high-quality interactions to happen before planning to achieve a quality plan.
In addition, the best teams are thinking further forward, yet the quarterly focus normally misses “what’s next”, lacking the forward view past the quarterly boundary.
Occurring at the worst time
The planning event happens at the boundary of the previous quarter, to kick off the next quarter, however this is a time where the teams are heads down in delivery mode trying to achieve what they committed to, rather than in deep thinking mode considering what lies ahead.
There’s an overlap of effort on finalising delivery, thinking ahead and planning, reporting and documenting.
Throughout the quarter, there’s an imbalance of visibility and validity of the plans, the progress, the certainty and accuracy those plans represent.
At the wrong level
Plans are too high level and geared towards satisfying senior people, but the essential detail of the plan needed by the teams is missed. There is nothing in between these high-level quarterly plans and what the teams are actually going to be doing, and a five-minute slot to describe it to a large audience doesn't help the team understand what they have to deliver, nor how they need to play with others on what’s most important.
Theatre
There is a lot of pressure for people to appease leadership in these events. Senior leaders are invited and depending on company culture the level of pleasing them varies, but no one is immune to the power dynamic and so politically savvy players default to using glossy slide decks, beefing up their commitments and achievements to present a plan that is not backed up by delivery later. There are tools such as ‘confidence voting’ where people are able to call out a lack of confidence, time and again we see that naysayers and outliers are silenced and removed socially by the crowd. It's very natural in a big population of peers to defer to a normalised crowd's desire for all to be well. This type of ‘affinity bias’ is a normal human behaviour that thrives in a big room planning dynamic. By that time of the day, people are also pretty keen to get out of the room, so often give up their unpopular confidence vote in favour of going home.
Cost
For all of these reasons the wasted cost of having hundreds of people consumed with planning for two days a quarter can be huge. It can run to several hundred thousand dollars to pay people to undertake activities that result in a poor quality plan, it’s a clear case of waste that can be removed.
In my next instalment, we'll dive deep into how I was able to help two big Australian banks remove quarterly big room planning and increase their ability to deliver. Stay tuned and be prepared to take action to optimise your planning processes for the better!