Quarterly planning in an SME: necessary or overkill?

Recently I sat down with a client for something we had never done that way there before. Their first major version is almost ready, and instead of rushing straight on to whatever comes next, we took half a day to plan the next quarter together. Everyone involved in building it was at the table. It was a good session, and it produced something the whole team stood behind.

That got me thinking. I mainly know this kind of joint planning session from large organisations, where it is often called PI planningA product increment is the working result a team delivers at the end of a fixed period of a few months. The moment when that period is mapped out together in advance is called PI planning.: a fixed moment when everyone involved maps out the coming period together. There it is sometimes a cumbersome affair lasting several days. The question that came to mind was simple: does something like this really belong in an SME, or is it overkill for a small team?

To answer that question, it helps to look away for a moment from the scale at which large companies approach it, and to look at what actually happens at its core. You bring together the people who do the work and the people who know the priorities, you put on the table what really matters in the coming months, and together you turn that into a realistic plan rather than a list handed down from above. That's all. The heavy ceremony around it is something large organisations need because they are large, not because the exercise requires it.

And that is precisely why it often works better in an SME than in a large company. A small team already knows the context. Everyone is in the same room, decisions are made on the spot, and you don't have to align ten departments. What takes days in a large company can easily fit into half a day in an SME. So you pick out the valuable part and leave the overhead behind.

So what form should it take? Keep it light. Half a day per quarter is enough. Invite the right people: those who build, and those who know what is at stake commercially or operationally. Pick a handful of goals for the coming months, not twenty. Think in terms of realistic phasingBreaking a project into manageable, consecutive steps.: what comes first, what can wait, and what do we deliberately drop? And make sure you come out with one visible result, a plan that everyone in the room understands and supports. Not a thick document that nobody opens again, and certainly not a weekly repeat of the same exercise.

You mainly notice the benefits in the months that follow. There are fewer surprises, because the difficult choices were made together rather than along the way. The team feels a shared ownership of the plan, and that is something quite different from working through a task list someone else drew up. And you, as managing director, get a calmer view of where things are heading, without having to change course every week.

Still, it isn't for everyone. If there are only one or two of you, you don't need a forum to agree on things you already discuss all day. And if there is no real choice to be made, if the next quarter more or less plans itself, then a separate session is just one meeting too many. It only makes sense once there is more to do than there is time for, and several people help set the direction.

So yes, an SME can benefit from a planning session like this, provided you tailor it to your own size. Not because the big players do it, but because half a day of planning together helps you work more purposefully for a whole quarter. Take the idea, and leave the baggage where it belongs.