Continuous Planning

Continuous Planning is a tool designed to help GitLab account teams save time when building customer-facing success plans based on information maintained in customer collaboration groups. Anyone can use the tools to present updates on ongoing initiatives within their GitLab projects.

View the CSM Handbook homepage for additional CSM-related handbook pages.


Philosophy

When preparing for an executive business review or a similar presentation, it’s common to create slide-based presentations that reflect the success or progress of a project. Traditionally, this process requires manually gathering information from various sources. However, if you use GitLab to track project progress, you might already document key objectives or milestones as epics or issues within these groups. This documentation is valuable because it’s actively maintained during daily activities.

However, extracting information from these sources and incorporating it into a slide deck remains a manual process — but it doesn’t have to be. Imagine that while maintaining your customer collaboration groups, you follow a few standard guidelines for setting up epics and issues. For example, you might assign standardized labels to epics representing key objectives or write descriptions using a structured template. This approach makes the information machine-readable, allowing you to automate at least part of the slide deck creation process, thereby enhancing efficiency.

By automating as much of the process as possible and utilizing scheduled CI/CD pipelines to run the automation regularly, we arrive at what we call Continuous Planning. This approach saves time and ensures that the presentation assets are always up-to-date and available to stakeholders at any time, shifting the focus from manual updates to continuous generation.

See an example success plan.

More information can be found in the Continuous Planning open-source project.

Direction and how you can help

👋 This is the strategy for Continuous Planning, a tool the Customer Success Management (CSM) team created to standardize creating success plans for customers.

This strategy is a work in progress, and everyone can contribute. Sharing your feedback directly in the issues and epics is the best way to contribute to our strategy and vision.

Overview

Continuous Planning focuses on automating the creation of presentation materials by leveraging information from GitLab groups and projects. By standardizing how CSMs document customers’ objectives and initiatives and utilizing CI/CD pipelines and GraphQL, we ensure that these materials are up-to-date and easily accessible to anyone who needs them.

What we recently completed

  • Implementation of the Success Plan Viewer (private), which queries to collect all success plans within the GitLab account-management subgroup in one area. This allows managers and other team members to quickly find the associated success plan for customers.

  • Improved the efficiency of success plan data collection, decreasing the pipeline run time by 60%.

  • Rolled out Continuous Planning to EMEA CSMs.

  • Created a Continuous Planning Triage (private) bot that automates the addition of use case labels based on AI-reasoning, provides recommendations for better objective success criteria, and notifies CSM of overdue due dates, no DRI assigned, among other tasks to keep success plans up-to-date and actionable.

What we are currently working on

Our issue board provides detailed insight into everything currently in flight.

  • Researching how to automate our release notes to document updates related to Continuous Planning, including the SP Viewer and Blueprint.

  • Creating documentation for what good looks like with an updated example success plan. Including best practices, FAQ, and customer-facing material on the why of success plans.

  • Standardizing how CSMs track customer feature requests in the collaboration project wiki using GLQL.

  • Working on integrating success plan data into Gainsight.

What’s next for us

  • Q1 FY26 OKRs will be made available soon.

Future thinking

  • We want to extend Continuous Plannings usage beyond CSMs to other GitLab business units and customers. For example, Product Managers can use Continuous Planning to update the “What we recently completed” and “What we’re currently working on” sections of their group direction page. The PS team can use it to highlight updates to customers.