Quarterly Planning Template
Six commitments for the next twelve weeks, each one traceable back to an annual theme and forward to the sprint boards that will actually build it.
Six committed goals, each one finishable in twelve weeks and traceable to one of this year's themes.
Why most quarterly plans stop being used
Quarterly planning tends to fail differently from annual planning. The plan itself is usually reasonable at the start of the quarter (the goals sound right, the list isn't absurd), and it's the middle and the end that go wrong, quietly, in ways nobody catches until the review meeting.
The goals are copied from the annual document, unchanged. "Grow revenue" is a theme, not a quarterly goal. If a goal can't be checked off in twelve weeks with a clear yes or no, it hasn't actually been turned into a plan yet. It's just the same sentence, restated with a deadline attached.
There's no link back to the annual themes. Without that link, every quarter starts from a blank page and reinvents priorities from scratch, usually based on whatever felt urgent in the planning meeting that week. It becomes easy to commit to work that doesn't serve anything the company decided mattered for the year, simply because nobody checked.
The goals never reach the boards where sprints actually run. They stay in a planning document or a slide while the team's weekly board runs on its own separate list of tickets, so nobody notices a goal is off track until the review meeting, by which point there's no quarter left to fix it, only an explanation to prepare.
There's no mid-point check. The only two moments anyone looks at the plan are the day it's written and the day it's due, which means the six weeks in between, the only window where a course correction is actually possible, pass without anyone deciding anything.
The structure, and why each part is there
Small enough that adding a seventh goal means admitting something else has to drop. The trade-off happens on paper before the quarter starts, not mid-quarter under pressure.
Each commitment references the yearly theme it comes from in its wiki page, so a quarter's goals stay pointed at what the year already decided mattered.
Once a goal is committed, it gets broken into sprint-sized tasks on the team's regular boards. This is where quarterly planning ends and weekly execution begins.
Calculated from the team's measured velocity as sprints close, so "on track" is a number derived from real throughput, not a guess offered in a status meeting.
A wiki entry at week six recording, plainly, what's on track and what isn't, early enough that a goal can still be adjusted rather than just explained away later.
Ideas not chosen this quarter aren't lost. They sit in candidates until the next planning cycle, so committing to six goals doesn't mean discarding everything else.
What actually closed this quarter, kept next to what was committed at the start, so the gap between the two is visible rather than argued about from memory.
How to use it
- 01Pull from your annual themes, or start a workspace fresh if you're doing quarterly planning before you have themes written down. Free for up to five people.
- 02Choose five or six goals that are finishable in the quarter, not aspirational ones. If it can't reasonably close in twelve weeks, it belongs on next quarter's candidates instead.
- 03Break each committed goal into sprint work on your team boards in the same sitting you commit to it. An uncommitted goal is a wish, an unbroken-down one is still just a heading with no path to done.
- 04Set a mid-quarter checkpoint on the calendar and write the status plainly when it arrives, including the goals that are behind and why.
- 05At quarter close, compare shipped against committed and carry anything unfinished, with the reason, into the next quarter's candidates rather than quietly dropping it and starting fresh.
The six-goal cap is a starting point, not a rule enforced by the tool. Some teams run five, some run eight. What matters is that the number is small enough to force a real choice, and that every goal on the list has somewhere to go once it's committed. The forecast per goal is what makes that mid-quarter checkpoint worth holding at all: instead of a status meeting built on gut feel, week six starts from a number the team's own velocity already produced.
- A quarterly goal that can't be traced to an annual theme is probably scope creep dressed up as a plan
- Six committed goals is a plan; sixteen is a list of things that sounded good in a meeting
- Quarterly planning's job is to hand finishable goals to the boards that run week to week, not to run the weeks itself
Common questions
Yes. All templates are included on the Free plan, which covers up to five users and two projects and doesn't expire. Larger teams need a paid plan for the seats, not for the template. See pricing.
Annual planning sets a small number of yearly themes and checks them quarterly. Quarterly planning is narrower and more concrete. It takes one theme and commits to five or six specific, finishable goals for the next twelve weeks. Annual planning answers what direction the year is going; quarterly planning answers what will actually ship next.
Quarterly planning sets the goals; weekly planning sequences the actual tasks that get someone there. A committed quarterly goal is broken into sprint work on the team's regular board, and that board is what weekly planning runs against. The quarterly template stops being the thing you look at day to day once the handoff happens.
It moves back to candidates with a note on why, rather than silently dropping off. Some unfinished goals belong in next quarter's commitments as-is; others turn out to have been the wrong size, and get split or rescoped before they're picked up again.
Related pages
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