A quarterly review should give management permission to stop

There is a particular kind of action that appears in a quarterly review four times in a row. Its description never changes, the due date moves and the status remains amber.

By the second review, I would want to know whether management still believes the work is worth doing. By the fourth, the failure to make that decision is usually more concerning than the missed date itself.

A sensible review begins with what changed. Perhaps the original customer opportunity has weakened. Perhaps the proposed system would take more management time than expected. Or the owner was never given enough authority to move it forward. The answer may be to continue with a more credible plan, narrow the work or stop it altogether.

Stopping has a cost too. It may mean writing off preparation time, accepting a slower route to an objective or explaining a change of direction to the team. That deserves a deliberate decision, not an automatic instruction to carry on.

I would also be wary of adding a new priority without identifying the capacity it will use. If the managing director remains the approval point for every significant task, appointing more action owners will not by itself remove the bottleneck.

For each priority that survives the review, the action sheet should state the outcome, one accountable person, the date and what evidence will demonstrate progress. A short record of the decision and its reasoning is more valuable than a long transcript of the meeting.

Accendo's quarterly business review guide provides a scorecard and worksheet. Use those as a starting point, but keep the discussion centred on the choices the organisation actually has to make in the next 90 days.

Further reading

• Quarterly business review guide
• Strategic advisory