A 5-year plan is a long-term strategic roadmap for reaching specific goals. It describes where you are now and how you plan to achieve your objectives. Whether you aim to successfully carry out a complex project or grow your business within the next five years, a 5-year plan helps you gain vision and effectively run your initiatives.
Often depicting the existing state of an organization and where it wants to be at various future points of time, a 5-year plan is commonly used by leaders for the following basic purposes:
Without such a plan, you run the risk of taking action with poor results and losing traction. To help you set a clear direction to your plans, this page offers you a free downloadable 5-year plan timeline template and essential information on how to put such a visual tool to use.
A well-thought-out 5-year plan used for business purposes is a well-rounded document or presentation that typically includes the following key sections:
When creating a 5-year business plan, here are the steps you need to follow:
This 5-year plan timeline template was designed for professionals who need to summarize long-term plans or roadmaps for client or executive communications. Structured on a well-defined timeline that includes placeholders for key milestones and tasks, it enables long-term planners to estimate and forecast resource requirements and schedules for high-level audiences.
Providing a summary view of a long-term plan, the five-year timeline template is ideal for reporting and communication purposes such as reviews, presentations or proposals to stakeholders and clients who only want to see top-level summaries of a project.
It can also be used as a planning tool to help determine the sequence of tasks that must be accomplished by a certain time schedule, in order to achieve the objective. Project planners and project managers can use our 5-year plan timeline template at the beginning of the planning process to further define the stages, milestones and resources needed to deliver their initiatives. As the project moves along, they can use the 5-year plan timeline template as a quick visual to track their progress vs. the original plan.
Displaying essential data on a single PowerPoint slide, the 5-year plan template is simple to understand, impressive to see and easy to read. Moreover, since it is built directly in the presentation platform, you can easily edit the template to fit the particular style guides or color schemes of your company. It is intended to replace complicated Gantt charts, Excel tables, and hard-to-follow milestone charts.
This timeline template was created with the timeline creator from Office Timeline which lets you automatically update the slide with your data in just a few clicks. Office Timeline is a free project planner add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint, and its Pro+ edition integrates with tools like Microsoft Project and Microsoft Excel. This allows you to quickly import existing project data into PowerPoint and instantly transform it into planning slides like the 5-year plan template.
Use the Office Timeline PowerPoint add-in to quickly update any of these timeline templates or create your own project visuals. Easily change the texts, dates, colors, shapes and styles of your timeline, right from inside PowerPoint.
Or try our online timeline maker.