How to Craft a 30-60-90 Day Plan
Congratulations! You’ve recently started a new role. Armed only with the job description (if there is one) and what you’ve gleaned from your interviews, you’re excited to dive into the work. But…how exactly do you do that? Program managers are supposed to be self-sufficient, but you’re used to your old role and aren’t quite sure where to begin.
I’ve written before about what it’s like to pick up a new project midstream, but in this post, I want to expand on some of the steps I outlined and dive a little deeper into the tactics. This blog post will explain how to craft a 30-60-90 day plan as a way to align with your stakeholders on expected scope, measure outcomes, and stay accountable to your stated goals.
What is a 30-60-90 Day Plan?
At the risk of stating the obvious, a 30-60-90 day plan is a document that maps out what you’ll accomplish in the next quarter (in this context, the first quarter in a new role.) 90 days is a useful timeframe as it typically aligns to a quarterly business cycle. In that case, you might wonder why you should bother to list 30- and 60-day accomplishments. Two reasons:
Your objectives for the last month of the quarter are likely less apparent at this stage, given you haven’t been with the organization long and don’t yet have sufficient insight to predict what your world looks like in month 3.
You’ll want to highlight some quick wins in the first month to foster trust with your stakeholders and demonstrate the value of program management, since let’s face it, many people are clueless about what we actually do.
What a 30-60-90 Day Plan Isn’t
OKRs - If you’re lucky enough to be coming into a role that already has established OKRs, you can certainly craft your 30-60-90 day plan with those OKRs in mind. But, the altitude for this plan is closer to the ground level than 30,000 feet. And, if your program doesn’t have established OKRs, you likely won’t have sufficient context in your first few days and weeks on the job to identify what OKRs to set. It typically takes some ramp-up time to craft meaningful metrics. The 30-60-90 day action plan can help guide your thinking on the goal setting process later on.
Professional development goals - You can subtly weave activities into this plan that satisfy performance evaluation criteria, but this plan is about the program you’re managing and how you can contribute to make that program more successful.
How to Craft a 30-60-90 Day Plan
To craft a 30-60-90 day plan, you’ll want to:
Hold 1:1s with your stakeholders
Synthesize and prioritize the findings
Define what success looks like
Validate with stakeholders.
Hold 1:1s with Your Stakeholders
As a program manager, building relationships is your bread and butter. Ask your manager for a list of folks that you should meet with, meet with them, and then ask every person you meet with for additional recommendations. You’ll accumulate quite the crew this way. Make sure you interview a swathe of staff—junior and senior—and, if your role is cross-functional, then make sure to engage with representatives from each department you’ll interact with.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions if you don’t understand something. You only have limited time to claim newbie status, so embrace the power of being an outsider.
Here is a sample set of questions to ask:
What is your role on the team/project?
What are your most critical business issues? How can we partner to achieve that?
What do you like best about your job? What is going well?
What is difficult about your job? What do you wish could be improved?
Do you have leadership buy-in for what you are trying to accomplish? Are there any sensitivities I should be aware of?
What would you expect me to accomplish in my first 90 days?
Who else would you recommend I meet with?
Synthesize and Prioritize Findings
As you meet with people, keep detailed notes, review your notes ahead of future meetings, and refine the questions you ask. Start to synthesize and categorize your findings according to common themes. Mind mapping (potentially using specialized software) can be useful for this type of exercise.
You’ll likely end up with a long list of pain points and potential projects. The next step is to prioritize how you’ll tackle them. This is highly context-specific, but consider the following questions to guide you:
How frequently did this finding come up? If it is repeated often, it is probably important.
Does leadership want to prioritize this item? In that case, unless junior employees feel differently or some upfront work is required for success, then that finding may need to be front loaded.
What quick wins can you establish in the first 30 days that may not be important or urgent but would generate goodwill and pave the way for future success?
Does the team have the capacity to take on this item in the timeframe identified? If not, what would need to be deprioritized to focus on this project? Is it possible to deprioritize that item? Is leadership prepared to allocate the time and energy required to manage this change?
What external deadlines, if any, impact these activities and thus cannot be shifted?
Define Success
Once you’ve identified the items in your plan and slated them into the month when you’ll tackle them, define what success looks like for each item. Crafting SMART goals is one way to make sure you are clear on the outcomes you intend to achieve.
Validate with Stakeholders
Present the plan to your stakeholders. This plan should include sections for 30 day outcomes, 60 day outcomes, and 90 day outcomes. It should also demonstrate how each of these outcomes maps to the anonymized key findings you gleaned from stakeholder interviews. Make it clear that the plan will flex, as needed, based on organizational developments and your continued on-the-job learnings. But, the 30-60-90 day plan is a useful guidepost to help you gain traction as quickly as possible and ramp up on the most important projects.
If you’ve successfully (or unsuccessfully) used a 30-60-90 day plan, let me know in the comments!
