Plans and Sub-Plans

A plan is where you'll be setting the work you want to track into Objectives, Outcomes and Tasks. Typically plans will be associated with a certain team or project and time-boxed to a quarter or year.

Creating a plan

Creating a plan is one of the first things that you'll do in Tability. Head to the plans tab in the left navigation, and click on the Create a Plan button to get started.

For more info see: How to add your first plan

Plan Lifecycles and Timelines

Every plan goes through four states: Draft → Published → In Progress → Ended 

The main factor that drives the Plan lifecycle is the timeline. In each state a plan will act differently.

Draft state: This is a plan that has been created, but not yet published. Once the creator or a plan reviewer presses the Publish button, it will go into the next state.

Published state: A published plan is a plan that is published but is set to start tracking in a future date, ie. Next Quarter. In this state, a plan is visible to everyone in the workspace but it will not send out any Check-in reminders until the start date has been reached. Once that start date is reached, the plan will automatically transition to the In Progress state.

In Progress state: This is the active state of a plan and where you'll start to see most of the main features a plan provides. Once a plan is in the In Progress state, it will start to send Automated Check-in reminders and you can start to make your first check-ins.

Ended state: Once your timeline has lapsed, a plan automatically will transition to a Ended state. This stops all check-in reminders. At this point you can also choose to archive this plan, so that it doesn't appear in the Plans.

Sub-Plans

After you've created your first plan, you will have the ability to create Sub-Plans. A Sub-Plan is no different than a Plan, except that it has a parent plan. It is purely an organizational feature but can be quite powerful in displaying connecting and context to your plans.

By creating Sub-Plans underneath your Plans, you'll be able to see how each plan is connected to a larger plan. In the Strategy Map view, you'll be able to visualize the connections from Sub-Plans up to the Plans above. 

You'll also be able to see the connections when looking at your Plan, in the Sub-Plans panel. In every Plan, you'll be able to quickly navigate to every Sub-Plan nested below, so that you can quickly navigate to the Plans that support the one you're looking at. 

Organizing your Plans and Sub-Plans

Typically, a plan is associated with a specific team or project and a specific timeline or quarter. An easy way to think about Plans and Sub-Plans is to consider each as parent and child. Each overarching Plan could include several Sub-Plans that are related to it, and those Sub-Plans could have more of their own. 

A typical Plan hierarchy usually has an overarching group Plan, like a set of company wide objectives, which then each team creates their own Plans to help accomplish the company wide Plan. It could result in a structure like this one:

• Company Plan FY2020
  • Company Plan Q1
    
    • Engineering Q1 Plan
    • Design Q1 Plan
    • Marketing Q1 Plan
  • Company Plan Q2
    • Engineering Q2 Plan
    • Design Q2 Plan
    • Marketing Q2 Plan

This set of Plans is organized with the company wide Yearly goals at the top, which then break into 4 Quarterly goals, and then each team within the Quarter. This is just a common example of how OKRs are aligned, but whatever structure your company already has in place is what we would recommend you try to stick to.