Team Operational Plan
In fast-growing companies, it is more critical than ever to collaborate well within your team and cross-functionally. And the best collaboration happens when your teams are aligned and working towards the same vision and goals. You can help your team thrive by providing them clarity on how their work connects to the bigger picture and can give your cross-functional stakeholders confidence by keeping them informed of your strategy and plans. Use this quarterly operational plan template to capture your team's plans, needs, and goals and communicate it clearly to your stakeholders and partners.
In this article, you’ll learn:
Benefits of creating a quarterly operational plan
Steps to create your own operational plan
Every team’s operational plans will look different depending on your team’s structure, goals, and work. Additionally, your company or department may have a standard approach or outline to use for your operational plan, in which case you should utilize these as your template. If you don’t have a template like this at your disposal, you can find recommendations for creating your own below, or download our template here to get started.
Why should I create an operational plan for My team?
You can help keep your team on track towards your annual goals, secure the resources you’ll need, and identify any gaps by going through the exercise of creating and sharing your quarterly operational plan. The primary benefits you might see from your operational plan include:
Aligning your team on how their work connects to the bigger picture
If you have strong goals, your team should understand the impact of their work, and your operational plan can take this to the next level by connecting the dots between the team goals, their work, and the other logistics of resourcing and collaborating with other teams.
Improving collaboration and coordination with cross-functional teams
Your operational plan will provide a structured outline of what your team plans to work on, what resources you need to do so, and how your work is supporting the broader company objectives. This information can help your cross-functional partners to understand how to prioritize any requests you have for them and how best to collaborate with you over time.
Creating consistency in planning and communication
Once you get into a rhythm of updating your operational plan each quarter, you will be able to provide stability and shared expectations on your planning for your team and partners. Additionally, this consistency will help reduce the load of planning each quarter as you can build on what you have from one quarter to the next instead of recreating your strategy and plans each cycle.
Identifying gaps between your plans and the resources necessary
By mapping out the resources and requests you’ll need to accomplish your goals, you can identify where you haven’t yet secured resources or aligned with cross-functional teams. As you identify these gaps, you can work on creating plans to fill them ahead of time so you aren’t forced to make dozens of last minute requests for other teams.
How to create your first quarterly operational plan
There is a variety of information you could include in your team’s quarterly operational plan, and below is a process to help you build your plan with the most common types of information. Ideally, you should complete your operational plan within the month before the quarter starts, and you can also move to a bi-annual planning process if quarterly planning is too frequent for your team’s cadence.
Create your operational plan document, including:
Outline the core principles and purpose of your team
At the top of your operational plan you should outline what your team does within the company and what your guiding principles are. This will help set context for other teams that may not be familiar with your function or day-to-day work. This may not change significantly quarter-over-quarter, but it is helpful to include as context for the rest of your document. This also provides a good opportunity for you to consider reviewing your guiding principles, values, and team mission on a regular basis to update it as your team evolves.
Summarize recent progress and performance on last quarter's goals
After setting the broader context for your team, you should recap your team’s performance from the last quarter. This should include an evaluation of how well you did against your goals and any other significant updates or major accomplishments across the team. Include items such as new teammates joining, any promotions or departures, and launches or milestones.
Capture goals and high-level plans for execution
Once you’ve reviewed your recent progress, you’re ready to start looking forward to the quarter ahead. Start by outlining your goals and how they align to the company objective. Include information about who on the team is owning each goal and what the measure of success is. Under each goal, outline the high-level plan of action such as the milestones, projects, or body of work that will be completed to accomplish the goal.
You can outline your plan in your project management tool of choice and include screenshots and links in your document if you want to include timelines and make the plans a bit more visual.
Document resourcing, hiring, and cross-functional needs
Now that you’ve captured what you are aiming to accomplish, you need to include details about what resources you’ll need in order to succeed. Add a resourcing section and outline the budget you’ll need with key line items, any additional headcount you’ll need, and key cross-functional requests you’ll need to fulfill.
You should consider building out a more robust budget for your team which you can link out to from your operational plan, but at a minimum, you should outline any additional budget you’ll need for the quarter for tooling, training, team building, or supplies for your team.
When outlining the headcount you’ll need, you should include context about your long-term growth forecasting to help people understand how this quarter’s hires fit into the broader picture. Additionally, you can include information about what you would do with an additional headcount as an opportunistic plan of where you would invest.
For cross-functional requests, include any large dependencies your team’s work has from other teams. This should include anything you’ll need to have done by other teams in order to complete your own work. Ideally, you should discuss these needs with the relevant team leads to put these on their radar as you include them in your plan. By outlining these in your operational plan, you are describing what commitments you’ll need from other teams to accomplish your goals, which will prevent any surprises on where you’ll be blocked if they aren’t able to supply the bandwidth on their teams.
Include any other information relevant to your team’s operations for the quarter
Above are the foundational components of your operational plan. You can also include other sections for information that is relevant for your team or company. The idea is to make this document the source of truth for your team’s plans for the quarter, so you should include as much information as you feel is necessary to accomplish this.
Share your document with your manager, key team members, and close team leads for feedback
Once you have the draft of your operational plan completed, you should circulate it with 3-4 close stakeholders to get feedback so you know where to provide more context, adjust plans, or clarify information within. It can be helpful to get this feedback from at least a couple of people on your team and 1-2 trusted team leads who you work closely with. They will be able to provide honest feedback and helpful suggestions for improving your plan before you share it more broadly.
You could also create the document collaboratively with input from each person on the team. For example, consider asking each goal owner to add in the high-level plan for their goals and be sure to source input on the resourcing needs from each person on the team as you are compiling the list of needs.
Share strategy doc with broader team and cross-functional partners and present where necessary
After getting feedback and finalizing your operational plan, you are ready to share it with your broader stakeholder group. Share the plan with your department’s leadership team, your cross-functional partners (especially those that you will have requests for throughout the quarter), and any other teammates who collaborate with your team.
If your company or department holds quarterly planning meetings, you can use the information from your operational plan to create a synthesis of the information for these meetings. Capture the main points from each section in a slide presentation and share this with the group. This offers an opportunity to socialize your plan across the department, to get buy-in on your resourcing needs, and to answer questions or field requests from other teams.
After socializing the plan initially, you can then reference it as new requests or projects arise or as prioritization discussions arise. Of course you’ll never be able to execute on the outlined plan exactly, but by having the plan you can discuss necessary tradeoffs and discuss the implications of various changes as your work unfolds.
Now you know the basic steps to create your operational plan, including:
Creating your operational plan document with:
Team mission and core principles
Review summary of past work
Outline of quarterly goals and high-level plan of action
Resource needs including budget, headcount, and cross-functional requests
Get feedback on the plan from close collaborators and iterate
Share the finalized plan with your leadership team and cross-functional stakeholders
If you want a jump start on creating your operational plan, you can download our template here.
Happy planning!