Every January, shortly after we kick off the new year, we embark on one of my favorite exercises: Annual Planning. As I wrote about last quarter, this all started back in 2018, and after a series of failures, we’ve managed to get it down to a science…kind of.
At its core, our process is pretty simple. We start by putting each team in a conference room together and asking them to perform a SWOT analysis on their team. That leads to a lot of interesting (and sometimes uncomfortable) conversations.
We ask (and frankly push) everyone on the team to participate, and the process is facilitated by one of the members of our Leadership Team who does NOT manage that department. We ask that the team’s manager be the note taker and to listen more than they talk. We encourage the team to speak frankly and freely, making the process a very much bottom-up approach.
We also ask the teams to answer a series of questions, which may differ from year to year. Usually, they’re geared toward supporting growth goals, but we review and update the question list annually. This helps us get input directly from the team on what’s needed to support our plans and goals for the upcoming year.
Each team follows the same process and is asked to identify and figure out how to solve their own biggest challenges. The process yields new information and new ideas every year. It also gives every member of the team a chance to participate and to feel heard.
In February, our Leadership Team will head down to Scottsdale, Arizona, to get some sun, play some mini-golf, and spend the better part of 3 days in a conference room stitching 5 different and disparate team plans together into a single, cohesive annual plan. While we can’t promise that each team will get exactly what they wanted, we can ensure that we’ll all be moving forward in the same direction, with a document to guide us for the year.
Does your team have any sort of annual planning ritual? Drop me a line at kevin@dynamiccomputing.com and let me know what works well for your company!
Kevin Gemeroy
Kevin is the Founder and CEO of Dynamic Computing. He’s both a visionary leader and an expert hands on practitioner with years of experience in all things IT. Dynamic Computing makes technology work for top-performing small to mid-sized organizations in the Seattle area. We offer managed IT services, IT consulting and transformations for companies from a few to a few hundred employees. Kevin founded Dynamic Computing in the year 2000 while in attending the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington. As a fourth generation small business owner and entrepreneur, Kevin knew that small to mid-sized companies needed a better solution to help guide and support their use of technology. So he set out to build a company that would look closer to truly understand our clients' businesses and partner with them to guide and support them on their path. Over the past few years, we've focused our energy on growth, change and improvement, scaling our operations and improving our processes with every step. We've managed to triple the size of our team and revenues while consistently ranking among the best in class for industry performance. Kevin was recognized as a 40 under 40 honoree by the Puget Sound Business Journal in 2018 and as Washington State's Mr. Future Business Leader by FBLA in 1998. So what’s next? Well, we're building the premier managed IT services company in the Pacific Northwest and we won’t stop until we get there. We hope you’ll join us on our journey.
