Your individual plan contains the big, important rocks you own and can answer to your manager for. Having a plan helps you make decisions about what is important and what can wait; what’s in and what’s out.
Plan screen cheat sheet
Below is a cheat sheet showing you the important aspects of the planning screen. Click the image to see it fullscreen. You can also download the PDF to print and keep it beside you as you learn the LeadFirst software PDF | Plans - Cheat Sheet.
Toggle Card and List Views
You can view your plan as a list or in card view.
List view of plan
Card view of plan.
To-Do list & new items
Your To-Do list, in the far right panel, is your plan’s inbox. Any project or MOR assigned to you appears here.
When new items come in, review and decide if they belong in your plan (i.e. are they important enough to be included in your quarterly review?). If so, add them to your plan.
To add an item, hover over it and click the add to plan icon.
The system will suggest to add it to your plan and the correct section. You can adjust these settings to send the item to a different section or even another person's plan. Click Select when you are ready to add it to your plan.
Once your plan is ready for the upcoming quarter, and your manager gives you the "OK," mark it approved. This creates a quarterly check-in for you and your manager to complete at the end of the quarter.
Note:
If you do not approve your plan within 7 days of the beginning of a quarter, the system will automatically create a quarterly check-in for your plan.
Completing a self check-in on your plan
The Self Check-in is a weekly 15-minute process to proactively review and update your individual plan. Make sure you know when your manager is expecting your weekly self check-in.
Learn more:
We will cover some of the basics about the self check-in below, but for a more thorough explanation, see Getting started with Self Check-in.
Quickly open any item's check-in form
You can quickly perform a check-in on any item of your plan by clicking on the state or stage status icons.
Important:
Clicking the pencil by a status will not open the check-in but instead opens the status quick-edit box. To open the check-in form, be sure to click directly on the status.
When you click on a status, the check-in form will slide out. Here you can update the status and make any progress comments that your manager or team needs to know about.
MORs or projects with recent progress comments (within the last 7 days) will have a red message icon and the most recent progress comment will be visible. You can click the hyper-linked comment to see all of the recent progress comments.
Status icons alert you when a MOR or project needs to be checked in. You can set a check-in schedule for each item in your plan (see the next section to learn how to set the schedule). Based on that schedule, the status icon will alert you as to when you need to perform a check-in.
The hourglass indicates a check-in is coming due within the next two days.
The exclamation point indicates a check-in is overdue.
The clear status icon indicates this item is up-to-date based on the check-in schedule.
The most critical factor for a project to succeed is clearly defining the project’s outcome. Every project on your plan should have a clear, concise description of its purpose and scope.
When you add a new project, you can add an Overall Outcome for the project right from the main Project tab.
The Overall Outcome should describe what "done" means for a project. If you are planning a large project that will span several quarters, you can also create quarterly outcomes to describe the milestones you will reach by the end of each quarter. To add quarterly outcomes, open the Outcomes tab for your project.
When in any plan or work breakdown, you can change which outcome timeframe (ie.Overall, Current Quarter, Next Quarter) is displayed in the Measure/Outcome column.
Click on the column header, open Outcome Timeframe, and select one of the display options.
Current Qtr to display the current quarter outcomes for projects with outcomes identified for this quarter
Next Qtr to display next quarter's outcomes for projects with outcomes identified for the next quarter
Overall to display the overall outcome for all projects
If a project does not have quarterly outcomes for the time frame you select, the system will display the overall outcome for the project
