Each year various companies plan next year budgets and prepare potential roadmaps of what are the targets and how they are planning to achieve them - this is were investment planning is important.

During my 10+ years experience in companies that operate in telecommunication, banking and IT sectors, I have gained quite an amount of knowledge and been part of or build and run the process of annual planning. I have had an opportunity to represent multiple stakeholders from IT, Business, Sales, Customer experience areas, i managed to get a different perspective of how annual planning could be run. This is why i have put together list of key tips and tricks on how this important process that gets so much attention every year could be organised.

So course in short is about possible approaches of how annual planning could be done. I will touch upon what investment bucket planning mean and what to consider while planning investment buckets in order to make sure that this top down planning approach take into account capacity so that budget would not be blown up in the middle of the year. There will be knowledge shared on how communication should be organised during annual planning and ready to use communication plan template will be available for download. In addition to all of that recommendation about initiative prioritisation will be described.