Plans
Plans provide a way to organize and track objectives. A plan allows you to:
Define, manage and prioritize objectives;
See at a glance the progress and health of your objectives, as well as the plan as a whole;
Measure how quickly and efficiently objectives are completed.
Often in software development, higher-level roadmapping is done in one tool (or a spreadsheet), while the detailed engineering work is defined and managed in a separate, task management tool. Once engineering work begins, syncing the detailed realities of that work back to the higher-level roadmap is frequently a patchwork, manual effort, which tries to capture team sentiment on work state—e.g. “red/yellow/green,” or other generalized, qualitative, point-in-time indicators.
Socratic not only unifies these worlds, but also harnesses task activity data to build a real-time picture of plan and objective health. With Plans, you create and prioritize higher-level objectives, and then teams add detailed tasks to each. As these associated tasks progress, the objective instantly reflects work state, health, and forecast time remaining.
Creating a plan
To create a plan, simply give it a name and press enter. Click the plan to open.
Note that you may create as many plans as you like. However, usually you'll need only one plan at a time. Except perhaps for very large organizations, it's uncommon to have multiple active plans. More common is a single plan that is used to manage the work of, say, a calendar year. At the end of the year, the plan can be marked as completed, and a new plan created for the coming year.
There are three ways to define, view and manage objectives in a plan:
Tree
The tree mode provides for a hierarchical layout of objectives and any sub-objectives. This spreadsheet-like mode allows for the quick drafting and organization, including the grouping of objectives (e.g. “Q4 OKRs” or “v3 Product Release”).
When creating a new plan, you’ll begin on the tree mode. Here you first create an objective grouping, under which you can then create objectives. The grouping is simply a way to organize objectives in a way that makes sense to you—examples include OKRs, or a key outcome, etc. You can have as many groupings as you like.
To adjust which columns are displayed, as well as their order, choose the equalizer icon in the upper-left of the plan:
You may also export this view of the plan to a .pdf file, to share with stakeholders. The .pdf will mirror your chosen column selections and any applied filters.
Board
The board mode provides a kanban layout to prioritize and manage all objectives in the plan (as well as create new ones). Just as workstreams define the workflow for tasks, plans define the workflow for their objectives.
The work phases of a plan can be customized via its settings (equalizer icon, upper right):
The Details tab provides for any additional descriptive information you want captured for your plan, as well as any attachments, etc.
Timeline
The timeline provides a Gantt-style view of plan objectives. The bar for each objective depicts start and end date (when set), as well as work progress. The darkest color is completed work; the lighter color is work in an active state. The dotted bar extension reflects Socratic's intelligent forecast for when the objective is likely to complete:
To change the time scale of your timeline, simply select Month, Quarter, or Year in the upper-right of the page.
Managing a plan
As objectives are prioritized and work begins, all the tasks those objectives contain, and all the work activity on those tasks, is rolled up automatically into the plan. You get a single, unified view of health and progress across the plan’s objectives, updated in real-time. Click any objective to see further detail.
The status bar for each objective reflects the percentage of tasks complete. Momentum shows at a glance what work is moving versus stalling or regressing. If the objective has a due date, we’ll show how that date compares to Socratic’s intelligent forecast.
The plan health card provides quick filters for both Momentum and Forecast. This way you can see at a click anything that’s trending late or slowing. These filters can be used together—e.g. you could click both “Down” and “Off Track” to see just objectives whose momentum is slowing and whose forecast is running late.
The People tab shows all people working on objectives that are part of the plan; the Tasks tab shows every task associated to an objective in the plan. The Trends tab provides Trends analysis for all the work specific to the plan.
When a plan is finished, you can mark it complete from the All Plans view by clicking the ellipsis (...) next to the plan name. You can also optionally archive plans.
Learn more in our guide: How We Build Socratic.
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