You’re making a cross-country road trip from Atlanta to Los Angeles. You’ve chosen your preferred route, and you’re getting there with the help of the navigation app on your phone. This is your strategic plan. You reach Oklahoma City and settle into a hotel for the night. There, you check weather reports and see that a tornado is due to hit New Mexico the next day. This means you need to reevaluate and redirect your route.
Your quarterly strategy review (QSR) is like tuning a musical instrument. Your strategic plan is vital, but just as a musician regularly adjusts their instrument for optimal sound, it’s important to conduct regular check-ins to see if any adjustments are needed for your roadmap.
QSRs are a structured process for regularly evaluating the progress and effectiveness of an organization’s strategic plan. Every three months, strategy teams assess metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) reached in the past quarter. They identify areas for improvement and make necessary adjustments to the strategic plan.
These reviews are crucial for ensuring the plan’s strategic alignment with your company’s goals and objectives and that it is being effectively executed. QSRs also provide opportunities for feedback, collaboration, and course correction, helping to keep the organization on track toward achieving its long-term vision.
What your quarterly review process should look like
Your quarterly strategy review sits between your annual strategic evaluation process and your monthly status update collection. It needs to be more robust than checking in on reviewing your updates but not as intense as your off-site, annual strategy review meeting where you and your team members analyze every aspect of the strategic goals and objectives.
Your QSR is an opportunity to look at all of the updates that have been collected in the previous quarter, identify issues, and make the adjustments needed to ensure smooth strategy execution. Sometimes, it is an opportunity to identify roadblocks that may require major adjustments to your strategy initiatives. This could include tweaking timelines, prioritizing some initiatives over others, and increasing or decreasing the amount of resources being used.
Every organization’s action plans and strategic objectives are different so there isn’t a specific QSR template to be followed. But here are a few tips to help you design your own process.
Have open and honest conversations
It’s natural for people to enter review meetings and feel the need to say that everything is going according to plan, even if it’s not. They may fear how it would look if they were to admit that things aren’t going according to plan, or they might not want to throw their colleagues under the bus.
Here’s where the leadership team needs to create a culture across the organization where people feel safe to ask for help. Reviewers need to be prepared to have open conversations about how to get back on course. Ultimately, it’s going to be much easier to make tweaks at an earlier stage instead of when it may be too late.
Work with leading and lagging metrics and KPIs
Data is key to staying on top of your strategy and decision-making process. When designing your strategy, it’s important to choose the right metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor your progress toward achieving your milestones.
Your long-term goals are measured using lagging metrics, such as an increase in revenue for a private organization or improved public opinion for a government entity. But for your quarterly strategy review, you’ll want to look at some leading metrics — quick pulse checks to understand if you’re headed in the right direction. Some examples of leading metrics include the number of sales leads generated or social media engagement.
Use your QSR to look at leading metrics. If any of these are behind, it gives you the opportunity to make tweaks going into the next quarter to improve the situation. This helps put you back on track toward achieving your overarching goals.
Improve review meeting efficiency
You’ve called your department heads and key stakeholders into a room for your quarterly session, but you spend most of the meeting just going over your metrics and updates. By the time you’ve gone through everything, you’ve only got a few minutes to make any decisions collectively. This is a waste of their time and yours and, considering the brainpower in the room, a missed opportunity.
To get the most out of these meetings, aim for the 90/10 ratio. This is when 10% of your meeting is spent presenting the updates and issues to be discussed, and the rest is used for making decisions and formulating action items to apply to your business strategy.
To do this, a certain level of preparation is involved. This means sending out updates and meeting agendas to the attendees ahead of time to give them enough chance to review and bring some suggestions to the table.
Who is involved in your quarterly strategy review?
Quarterly strategy sessions are ultimately a decision-making tool. This means that the people in attendance should be the ones with decision-making powers, such as your leadership team, strategy leaders, and any high-level stakeholders. These are the people who will get together, review progress, and discuss the best ways forward.
This, however, doesn’t mean that QSRs happen in isolation from the people on the ground. In fact, frontline teams play a crucial role: They do the work and provide the updates that directly inform the decisions made during QSRs.
Also, takeaways, action plans, and changes resulting from the QSR must be communicated to the rest of the organization to ensure everyone is informed and aligned.
If things are going according to plan, your broader audience should be made aware of this and should be celebrated. If anything needs changing, people need to know what is changing, how it’s changing, and why it’s changing.
Failure to do this could lead to frustration and loss of motivation among your team. After all, they’re investing a lot of time and resources into the strategy, and you need to ensure they maintain that sense of ownership.
How the city of Pittsburg streamlined its strategy evaluation process with AchieveIt
For a while, the City of Pittsburg in Northern California was able to effectively manage and oversee their projects using Smartsheet. But, as priorities evolved, the local government realized that they needed a more robust system to help them monitor strategic processes. Department directors were spending too much time focused on collecting updates and addressing status update queries.
The city turned to AchieveIt to create a more efficient and streamlined monitoring and evaluation process. With the insights obtained, they were able to integrate publicly accessible dashboards onto their website. This gave the community access to real-time information about the work being done for the good of the city.
To learn more about how Pittsburg regained authority over its performance metrics with AchieveIt, read the full story here.
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City of Pittsburg, California Customer Story
Read this customer story to better understand how a local government agency regained authority over their performance metrics, guaranteeing transparency and accountability through the use of AchieveIt.
