What Changed When We Did Quarterly Planning the BOS Way

Executive Summary:

A leadership team implemented BOS Quarterly Planning processes and took their quarterly planning time from 2-3 weeks to 1 day. After the 1-day focused planning session the resulting plans were clearer, the team was aligned, and everyone was energized. 

The End-of-Quarter Crunch

It’s the end of a quarter. For many leadership teams, this brings a familiar pattern: rushing to complete quarterly goals, scrambling to schedule planning sessions, and quietly wondering if the next quarter will be any different.

I’ve been in that exact spot. Part of a leadership team inside a growing company, with passionate people, but no clear system for planning.

We were busy but rarely aligned. Every quarter felt like we were reinventing the wheel.

What Wasn’t Working

Back then, our Quarterly Planning process looked like this:

• It took two to three weeks of multiple meetings to go through the planning process and come up with some kind of plan for the next quarter
• We didn’t really have a “plan for the planning”
• We didn’t do much pre-work and had lots of meetings
• These planning meetings often lost focus, with all kinds of tangents, and not much actual planning
• We didn’t have clear outputs in mind, so it was hard to tell when we were “done”
• People left with fuzzy goals, unclear next steps, and lack of ownership
• This meant that accountability and follow-through were difficult

It often felt more like a checkbox exercise than a strategic inflection point. The results were missed goals, team friction, and recurring issues that never quite got solved.

The Solution: Following a BOS Quarterly Planning methodology

We introduced a Quarterly Planning Methodology from a Business Operating System.

The new planning rhythm included:

• A single full-day session once per quarter
• Pre-work to reflect on the past 90 days
• A brief Company Scorecard review to guide focus
• A shared Issues List to bring real challenges to the surface
• Clear, team-driven Quarterly Rocks with owners and success criteria

This was real, satisfying work, and it created alignment we hadn’t had in years.

The Results

The first time we implemented this new process:

• We reduced planning time from 2–3 weeks to 1 focused day
  
• The team started the new quarter aligned on priorities and ownership
  
• Big, lingering issues actually got resolved, not just mentioned
• Quarterly goals (Rocks) were tracked and completed at a much higher rate
• People started looking forward to planning, instead of dreading it

Key Takeaways

There was clarity instead of confusion, momentum instead of drift, and a shared sense of purpose that spilled over into day-to-day execution. People trusted the process because it actually worked, and inter-personal trust increased because we were all accountable.

What Does Your Next 90 Days Look Like?

If you're heading into the next quarter and wondering how to get your team aligned around what really matters then it might be time for a better system. A BOS helped us plan with purpose and efficiency. That made all the difference.