Do, learn and adjust with OGSM

Achieve your objective and goals by steering on progress and results.

Evaluate your plan

An OGSM is a living plan. During execution, you gain new insights and learn from the results. Therefore, you must regularly evaluate and adjust your plan. Based on practical experience, we have developed a method applicable to all types of OGSM plans: from project plans to annual plans, from personal plans to multi-year plans.

Action and Strategy Review Sessions

You divide the total duration of the plan into smaller segments. This creates manageable periods. In a project, these could be project phases. In an organization, these could be quarters. During such a period, you monitor progress and evaluate the results at the end. This leads to two types of team sessions:

The strategy review focuses on the progress of the strategies and answers the question: are we doing the right things?

In the action review, you and your team answer the question: are we doing things right? This is a periodic session that focuses on the progress of the actions.

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Action Review

Every month the team discusses the status of actions they are working on. The aim is to gain insight into actions that are not going according to plan and to determine how the implementation of these actions can be improved.

Preparation

As preparation for the monthly session all owners of actions prepare their status updates. They do this before the session starts.

Agenda of the monthly session

In the monthly session, discuss all actions with the status orange or red:

  • What are we going to do to improve or speed up the action? Include this in the action plan.
  • What are the underlying reasons why the action does not go according to plan?

Strategy Review

Each quarter the team looks back on the past quarter and forward to the coming quarter. The purpose of the session is to learn from the results of the actions and to update the OGSM on the basis of new insights and developments. The quarterly session is the time to adjust the plan if necessary.

Preparation

For the quarterly session, the action owners update the status of their actions.

Where possible, update the indicators with current readings. The indicators help to make a proper assessment of the progress of the strategy.

Finally, the owners of the strategies give their opinion on the progress. They do this in a progress report prior to the session

Agenda of the quarterly session

In the quarterly session, discuss all strategies: What are the results of the past quarter? What can we learn from the progress? What is going well and what needs to be improved? What changes should we make? Process the changes in the OGSM.