Planning

The Planning feature in StartConsole provides a structured view of your quarterly initiative portfolio — what is planned for a given period, what budget is allocated to it, and how the planned roster compares to what is actually running.

What Planning does

Planning gives your leadership team a period-based view of the portfolio. For each planning period (typically a quarter), you can see:

• The total budget allocated to initiatives planned for that period
• The full list of initiatives included in the plan
• How many initiatives are planned versus how many are currently active
• Whether the portfolio is executing in line with what was committed in the planning session

This makes Planning the right place to review at the start of a new quarter: what did we commit to, and are we actually running it?

Planning period fields

Field	Description
Name	The label for this planning period. Convention: Q1 FY2025, Q2 2025, etc. Maximum 100 characters.
Start Date	The first day of the planning period.
End Date	The last day of the planning period.
Planning Budget	The total budget envelope allocated to this planning period. This is the top-down budget figure agreed by leadership — the ceiling against which initiative budgets are tracked during the planning session.
Status	Whether this planning period is Draft, Active, or Closed. Only one planning period can be Active at a time.

Activating a planning period

To make a planning period the current active period:

1. 1

   Navigate to Planning

   Go to Portfolio > Planning from the main navigation.

2. 2

   Open the planning period

   Click the planning period you want to activate.