Most OGSM plans quietly fall apart between reviews — not because the strategy was wrong, but because no one built a reliable ritual for interrogating it.
Running an OGSM quarterly review means gathering your leadership team for 60–90 minutes to assess four things: whether your Objective still reflects your ambition, whether your Goals are on track, whether your Strategies are working, and whether your Measures are telling the truth. You review Dashboard Measures to check the scoreboard and Action Plan Measures to understand why. Then you decide: stay the course, adjust tactics, or trigger a full re-plan.
In this article you’ll get a step-by-step facilitation guide — what to prepare before the meeting, the exact four questions to ask the room, how to update your OGSM documents correctly, and a 60–90 minute agenda you can run this quarter.
What should you prepare before the quarterly review?
The quality of your quarterly review is determined before anyone walks into the room. If you arrive with stale data and no pre-read, you’ll spend the first 30 minutes catching up instead of deciding.
Prepare at least 48 hours before the session:
- Update your Dashboard Measures. Pull actual vs. target for every Goal. If a measure is amber or red, be ready to explain the gap — not defend it.
- Update your Action Plan Measures. Each Strategy should have measurable milestones. Gather those actuals too.
- Prepare a one-page summary. A single document showing the current state of every Objective, Goal, Strategy, and Measure gives the room a shared starting point. Our OGSM template is built for exactly this.
- Flag the outliers in advance. Don’t walk through everything line by line. Pre-identify the two or three items that need a real conversation and make sure everyone knows what they are.
- Send the pre-read 24 hours before. Your team should arrive oriented, not overwhelmed. If people are still reading the summary when the meeting starts, you’ve already lost 20 minutes.
The facilitation job gets much easier when the facts aren’t in dispute before you begin.
What are the four questions to ask the room?
The quarterly review is a structured interrogation of your OGSM. These four questions give the session its spine. Ask them in order.
1. Is our Objective still the right ambition? Quarterly reviews rarely change the Objective — but you should ask. Has the competitive environment shifted? Has something internally changed the scope of what’s possible or necessary? If the answer is yes, flag it for a full re-plan (more on that below). If not, confirm it and move on quickly.
2. Are our Goals on track? Goals are your quantified targets — revenue, market share, retention, whatever you committed to. Go Dashboard Measure by Dashboard Measure. Green means proceed with a brief acknowledgement. Amber means diagnose. Red means decide. Don’t skip the green ones — a quick confirmation that something is working builds team confidence and keeps the energy right before you hit the difficult conversations.
3. Are our Strategies producing results? This is where most reviews get shallow. Strategy is how you intend to win — not a list of activities. The question is not “did we do the work?” but “is this approach generating the outcomes we expected?” Look at your Action Plan Measures here. If the activities are happening but the results aren’t following, your Strategy may be wrong — and that’s a different problem than your team underperforming.
4. What decisions do we need to make today? Every quarterly review must close with explicit decisions, not vague intentions. Resources reallocated? Strategy retired? New initiative approved? Write them down and assign owners before you leave the room. If you leave without decisions, you held a status update, not a strategy review.
How do you update Dashboard Measures versus Action Plan Measures?
This is one of the most common points of confusion in OGSM practice, so let’s be precise.
Dashboard Measures live at the Goal level. They tell you whether you’re on track to achieve your Objective via your Goals. These are typically lagging or leading indicators — monthly revenue, customer NPS, pipeline coverage, retention rate. You update them with actuals and compare against target. A Dashboard Measure tells you that there’s a problem.
Action Plan Measures live at the Strategy level. They track whether your Strategies are being executed effectively — things like number of new partnerships activated, conversion rate changes from a specific initiative, or features shipped against a roadmap commitment. These tell you why you may be on or off track at the Goal level.
The rule is simple: when a Dashboard Measure turns red, go immediately to the corresponding Action Plan Measures. The cause of the gap is almost always there. For a deeper look at how these two measure types work together and how to set them up correctly, read our guide to the OGSM Measures Column.
Update both sets of measures before the meeting. Update the document formally after — with the decisions and any adjusted targets recorded against the relevant measures.
When should a quarterly review trigger a full re-plan?
Most quarterly reviews should end with small adjustments: tweak a Strategy, reallocate budget, retire an initiative that isn’t generating results. That’s healthy OGSM practice.
A full re-plan is warranted when:
- The Objective is no longer valid. A market shift, acquisition, or significant internal change has made the original ambition wrong or irrelevant.
- Multiple Goals are structurally off track. Not a bad quarter, but a pattern that suggests the targets were wrong or the underlying business model has changed.
- Core Strategies are clearly failing. Not just slow — genuinely not working, with no credible line-of-sight to recovery in the remaining period.
- A critical assumption has been invalidated. Every Strategy is built on assumptions. If a core assumption has been proven wrong, the Strategy resting on it is suspect.
Be honest here. Continuing to execute a plan everyone in the room knows is broken is more expensive than re-planning. Trigger the re-plan early and you’ll have better options. Waiting until the annual review because “we committed to this” just compounds the cost.
What does a 60–90 minute quarterly review agenda look like?
Keep the agenda tight. Quarterly reviews fail when they sprawl into all-day workshops. Here’s a structure that works for most leadership teams:
0:00–0:10 — Open and orient (10 min) Confirm everyone has reviewed the pre-read. Note the key items flagged for discussion. Set the decision-making expectation: you’re leaving with explicit calls, not actions to investigate.
0:10–0:30 — Dashboard review (20 min) Walk through each Goal and its Dashboard Measure: actual vs. target, trend, owner commentary. Mark green, amber, or red as you go. Keep green items brief.
0:30–0:50 — Strategy deep dive (20 min) Focus only on amber and red Dashboard items. For each one, interrogate the Action Plan Measures. What’s driving the gap? Is the Strategy still valid, or does it need to change?
0:50–1:10 — Decisions and adjustments (20 min) What changes? Who owns it? Are any Strategies being retired or replaced? Is a full re-plan needed? Every decision gets an owner and a due date before you move to the next one.
1:10–1:20 — Close and next steps (10 min) Assign follow-up actions. Confirm the date and format of the next review. If you’re unsure how often you should be running these sessions, our article on OGSM review cadence covers the full annual rhythm and when to deviate from it.
That’s a quarterly review that sharpens your strategy rather than just reporting on it. The difference between teams that execute well and teams that drift is usually this: the ones who execute have a meeting they can’t avoid where the facts are on the table and decisions have to be made. Build that meeting, run it well, and your OGSM becomes a live tool rather than a document that ages in a shared drive.
Rock on.
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