As Spring moves into Summer, weddings, graduations or even exciting vacation plans are likely front of mind. Few leaders are thinking about their annual planning process; yet, this is an ideal time to revisit your organization’s Strategic Plans to assess your progress this year. A mid-year checkpoint is an important milestone for you and your leadership team to review plans and progress to date. You will want to evaluate:
- Broad Context:
- How is the business doing as a whole? What are your biggest challenges?
- Are our plans still relevant? Are these still our most important priorities considering your performance to-date?
- Are you ahead or behind both in terms of milestone completion and business results?
- What have you learned so far?
- What do you wish to change or do differently considering the results to date?
To prepare for your mid-year review, you and your team should prepare a status outline related to your key initiatives. You can use the A3 format or another project summary format. But, regardless of format, you should include:
- Background – a summary of the business reasons you sponsored this initiative; why is this important to the organization?
- Objectives –key outcomes and goals for this initiative or program
- Current status
- Task / Action Completion
- Measurable results – performance vs. plan
- Overall Assessment – a gap analysis and an evaluation of the results to date
- Causal Analysis – root cause analysis of any gaps in performance – if you are behind, why?
- Future Action – if you are behind, what countermeasures you will implement? When?
If you answer these key questions now, you will have time to course-correct and to address emerging threats to achieving plan.
