Understanding the Insaplan structure
What a project contains, and how plans, plan elements and the other items you create work together.
Insaplan organizes your work into projects. Within a project you build plans, record and analyze your data, and prepare the material you share with others.
Projects
A project is the container for one body of work, such as a stakeholder analysis, a strategic planning exercise, or a sales account plan.
Everything you create in Insaplan belongs to a project, and your organization can run as many projects as it needs. You see them listed under Projects.
Plans
A plan is a set of strategic objectives, arranged to suit the way your organization works.
The structure is yours to choose. A plan might follow an OKR framework, a goals and initiatives hierarchy, or any other approach your organization uses.
One project can hold several plans, each with its own structure.
Plan elements
A plan element is a single item within a plan, such as an objective, a key result, or an initiative.
Elements sit beneath one another in a hierarchy that you define. A plan built around OKRs might place key results beneath each objective, with the initiatives that deliver them beneath those. A different plan in the same project can use a different arrangement entirely.
Attaching data to an element
Each element can carry additional information, held in data blocks. A data block is a set of fields for one kind of information, and your organization chooses which are available.
Insaplan provides blocks for measurement, delivery and governance, including:
| Data block | What it records |
|---|---|
| KPI | A measure with its target and current value |
| Risk | A risk with its likelihood, impact and mitigation |
| Milestones | Dates the element must meet |
| Budget | Planned and actual spend |
| Stakeholders | The people with an interest in the element |
| Decision Log | Decisions taken, and the reasoning behind them |
An objective might carry the KPIs that measure it and the risks that threaten it, while an initiative beneath it carries its milestones and budget.
Working with your data
Alongside its plans, a project holds the items you use to record, analyze and present information.
| Item | What you use it for |
|---|---|
| Custom table | A table you build and populate yourself |
| Data table | A table that brings in your own data |
| Chart | Presenting data visually |
| Infographic | Explaining insights, and giving background to your project and the decisions made within a plan |
These sit beside your plans in the same project, rather than inside any one of them.
Sharing your work
Once your content is in place, you can bring it together for an audience in several ways.
| Output | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| Presentation | A set of slides built from your project content |
| Export | Your work as a PowerPoint or PDF file to share outside Insaplan |
Dashboards and reports are covered separately below.
Dashboards
A dashboard brings your progress measures together on one screen, so you can see where a project stands without opening its plans.
A dashboard reads your live data. Update a KPI on a plan element and the dashboard reflects it, which makes it the screen to keep open during a review rather than something to prepare beforehand.
You can build a dashboard for a single project, or use the organization-wide dashboard under Dashboard to see across every project you have access to.
Reports
A report is a document you assemble from your work and share with an audience, built page by page from panes that each hold a chart, a table, or your own text.
A report stays live. The figures in it follow your projects as they change, so a board pack assembled in September shows September's position without being rebuilt. Export it to PDF when you need a fixed copy to circulate.
Reports draw on every project you have access to rather than a single one, which makes them the place to set out progress across your whole portfolio. You find them under Reports.
The knowledge base
The knowledge base is where your organization keeps its insights, so that work done in one project is available to every other.
Sharing insights centrally gives your organization a single source of truth. You can draw on an insight recorded by another team, and share your own for others to use.
Your project's plans, charts, tables and infographics reach the knowledge base on their own. Insaplan adds them in the background as you save your work, so there is nothing to publish and no separate step to remember.
Templates
Everything described above is defined by a template. Plans, plan elements, data blocks, tables, charts and infographics each follow a template that sets out their structure.
Insaplan provides a set of templates ready to use, covering common planning frameworks and the data blocks listed above. Creating a plan from a template gives you its structure immediately, and you then fill it with your own content.
Organizations on a subscription that includes template creation can build their own templates in the Builder. A template you build belongs to your whole organization, so every project that uses it follows the same structure.