The Importance of Annual Reviews
As your business year comes to a close, you’re looking ahead to writing a new strategic plan or starting the next phase of a multi-year strategy. It’s easy to dive into drafting or updating next year’s plan by starting with all your new ideas and ambitions! But before you get swept away by “shiny objects”, it’s time to put on your hindsight goggles and take a look back.
Have you assessed the efficacy of your last strategic plan?
If you haven’t, you’re not alone. According to our 2025 State of Strategy Execution Report, 11% of organizations fail to re-evaluate their strategic plans annually. However, assuming your competitors are in the 89% of organizations that are conducting annual strategic plan reviews, you may be on the wrong side of this statistic: 82% of organizations that evaluate their strategic plans every year report an increase in achieving their goals.
If you’re not already in the habit of year-end reviews, don’t fret. Cultural change takes time, and happens in phases.
Read more about the Four Stages for Successful Cultural Transformation here.
There’s a first time for everything, so the next time you’re in the final quarter of your current strategic plan, use this guide to lead your team in determining the success of your previous year and how you can improve.
What Question does a Year-End Review Answer?
Organizations often need to provide annual reports to stakeholders: constituents in the public sector, or maybe a board of directors or even investors.
The main question you want your annual strategic review to answer is: “Did we have a good year (or a bad year)?”
It’s tempting to look at all the things you accomplished – “Look at all the projects we finished! The people we hired! The tasks we checked off!” But if all those things your team completed didn’t have an impact on your goals – profit growth, bettering patient outcomes, increasing public satisfaction – your organization’s strategy was not successful.
Your plan should be built to answer that question.
The secondary question you’re answering with the deep-dive into your previous year’s plan is: “How do we adjust our plan to make sure this year is successful?”
If a project is no longer accomplishing your organizational goals, everyone’s time and resources would be better spent on a different, more effective tactic. Your retrospective will help identify how to rewrite your plan to allow for tactical flexibility, setting you up for a more measurable, agile year.
And, as you’re building your Culture of Execution, your team will be able to pivot more quickly without pride of ownership or feeling the ache of sunk costs – and being weighed down by dead initiatives.
Read more about Developing a Culture of Strategy Execution here.
How to Conduct Your Annual Plan Evaluation
Think of your previous year’s strategic plan as a gigantic “Note to Self.” If you barrel into writing your new plan without reviewing your previous one, you run the risk of missing warning signs and repeating the same mistakes.
Assess the Initiative’s Success: Did it Meet the Corresponding Organizational Goal?
When you’re doing a postmortem on your past year’s plan, keep this gutcheck mantra in mind: “Was this strategic initiative directly tied to an org-wide desired outcome?”
Read more about How to Write Powerful, Precise Strategic Objectives and Goals here.
If yes, you can easily determine whether or not the projects your team executed were successful (did they meet your measurable goal?). Discuss a new reach target with your strategic leadership team based on the data you collected the previous year.
If an initiative is not directly tied to an overall organizational goal, ask yourself if the initiative is a vanity metric.
E.g. It’s the difference between, “We held 10 city council strategy meetings this quarter.” and, “After implementing a new performance-tracking dashboard, the city’s infrastructure project completion rate improved by 40%.”
You want each line item in your plan to roll up to improving a measurement that answers, “Why does our organization exist?”
E.g. If you work in local government, your organization exists to improve public services and community well-being. All of your initiatives should be directly tied to measurable improvements, such as increased citizen satisfaction with municipal services, reduced response times for emergency services, or improved infrastructure maintenance completion rates.
Some metrics are important to track, but don’t tie to bottom line goals. If the measurement of a plan item is to ensure you meet requirements or maintain status quo, ask yourself if it belongs in an operational plan instead.
Read more about Strategic Plans vs. Operational Plans here.
How to Pivot the Plan: Adjust Tactics or Measurements?
You found the initiatives you pursued last year do not indicate success.
Reconsider:
The Tactics
It’s simply a matter of budgeting. Discuss with your strategic leadership team which elements you’d like to repeat and strike a balance between setting aside resources for trying new things alongside things that proved to work well.
The most important thing to keep in mind while writing your new plan is to have a handful of different initiatives to achieve the same goal. This will allow your organization to make agile responses throughout the year to allocate more time/money/personnel to lean into things that show to be working better than others.
The Measurements
Reassessing your measurements doesn’t mean resetting your targets. Don’t move the goal posts to a threshold you’re more likely to hit just because you want a win!
Remember to use your status updates to provide an accurate picture of the health of your plan
Your organization’s “North Star” should remain the same, but you may need to change the way you’re measuring it. Especially for organizations with big missions, you may need to back into shorter term goals and introduce ways of benchmarking the data to more precisely measure your impact.
For example, if you work in healthcare, your North Star may be to decrease the prevalence of a disease in the larger population you serve – a broad, long-term “Why does our organization exist” goal.
Your strategic initiative, however, should measure something you can more directly impact in the short term.
In the case given above, you may choose to introduce an annual survey of your population-at-large to benchmark their feelings about access to information and resources regarding the disease.
Keep in mind, you should use a good mix of qualitative and quantitative data to get a clear picture of your success
This concept of finding the right measurement of success without changing the target goal is especially important in multi-year plans. You should still check in with a plan assessment at the end of every year, but be careful not to stray too far from tracking the same desired outcomes over time.
Annual Plan Evaluations Are the Key to Strategic Success
People that are invested in your organization, whether financially or through an election process, need to know that your resources are being used to positively affect the outcomes your organization was established to do. In a wider culture of “productivity as currency,” busyness is so frequently mistaken for efficacy and impact. However, armed with the right information, you hold the power to assess how your organization is truly performing and set your team on the right course to accomplish what it set out to do.
Next Steps
Once you’ve gotten into a good annual debriefing cadence and are building your culture of execution, challenge yourself to start adding in quarterly plan reviews. While your core strategy team will meet to look at how goals are tracking every month, call in all the initiative owners every 3 months to conduct an assessment.
Ask yourself and your team if your resources are aligned to the things that show early indications of working. This kind of agility with projects and resources can really take your organization to the next level.
Build strategic sustainability with AchieveIt
Learn more about how AchieveIt can help you track your goals and even conduct your annual plan assessment with you. Reach out to one of our Execution Experts for a tailored look at how AchieveIt fits your organization and schedule a free demo today.
