This lives outside Plan/Do/Reflect on purpose: a real year runs the Program Increment Cadence, the Annual Operating Plan's OP1/OP2 budget cycle, and People Management's talent calendar all at once, overlapping rather than taking turns. People Management itself isn't built out yet, but its recurring milestones — calibration, reviews, comp planning — are tracked here since they land on the same calendar everything else does.
Innovation & Planning Week (IP) — PI Planning + Inspect & Adapt Sprint (2 weeks) Org/budget milestone People calendar milestone Continuous PI Planning (Sprint 4–6)
* Sprint boundaries here are illustrative (shown as even blocks); many organizations actually run sprints Wednesday–Tuesday rather than Monday–Friday, so ceremonies — planning, demo, retro — cluster mid-week and never fall on a Friday or a Monday.
Q4 is deliberately the busiest row: EOY Review and Comp Planning are both downstream of Talent Calibration, and OP2 is being built at the same time — the same convergence Organization's Overview flags as "Not One-and-Done."
Try It
Paste this into ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever AI tool you use:
Help me build a one-page annual calendar for my organization. Target layout: four rows, one per fiscal quarter, each showing six sequential sprints followed by one Innovation & Planning (IP) week for PI Planning and Inspect & Adapt. Under each quarter, list whatever actually lands in it — budget milestones (like when next year's plan gets drafted or finalized) and people-calendar milestones (calibration, performance reviews, comp planning) — and flag a "continuous planning" window over roughly the last half of each quarter's sprints, where prep for the next PI Planning begins. First ask me for the real inputs: my fiscal year's start month, sprint length, how many sprints per PI, and actual dates (or rough timing) for every budget and people milestone I have, including anything I haven't mentioned. Then render the whole thing as a markdown table, one row per quarter, so I get something concrete rather than just a description.