With one OGSM it is about the content. With five it starts to get interesting. With fifty it is a change programme, and then the software is the least of your worries.

This is the work a client genuinely needs you for, and it is also the work most consultants underestimate.

What you do

You decide where to draw the line. Which teams get their own OGSM and which do not? Too many plans and the organization drowns in reporting. Too few and the teams doing the work never see their own plan. That trade-off is about content, not technology, and there is no standard answer.

You guide the conversations between levels. A team leader who receives a strategy from above and has to build their own plan under it needs two things: to understand why that choice was made, and the room to say it is not achievable. The second conversation does not happen without someone organising it.

You take out the duplicated work. Two teams building the same capability without either noticing is expensive and more common than people think. You see it, because you read all the plans.

You guard the pace. A rollout across forty teams that has to happen in one quarter becomes a form-filling exercise. Say so up front, even if the sponsor wants to hear something else.

What the platform does

It keeps the connections visible instead of in a spreadsheet.

Linked strategies. A strategy is a full element with its own owner, indicators and actions, and it can be linked between plans. The line runs both ways: a team leader sees where their brief came from, and a director can open a choice and see the team plans behind it.

That counts most when a choice changes. A strategy quietly rewritten in the organization’s plan leaves five team plans still delivering the old one. With the link, the change is visible on both sides in the same week.

Shared goals and indicators, not copies. Customer satisfaction, a safety figure, a lead time: several teams contribute and no single team owns it. Such an indicator can sit in more than one OGSM. One definition, one target, one series of measurements. Two copies of a number immediately start reporting different things, and the argument about whose figure is right fills the session that should have been about acting.

Distributed actions. One action, one owner, one status, visible everywhere it is relevant. A large piece of work can be split into sub-actions across plans while the whole still reads as one thing. And there is an action overview across all OGSMs, for a programme office that needs to know what is really running.

Where a rollout stalls

Reporting pressure. If teams feel they are reporting for the layer above them, it is over. The plan has to be theirs first and readable for the organization second. That order cannot be reversed.

Copying instead of choosing. Teams that take over the strategies from above have not made a plan, they have filled in a form. You spot it immediately: the choices are word for word identical and nothing falls outside them.

One big launch. Forty teams starting in the same week means forty teams with the same questions at the same time. Start with three teams that do it well, use them as the example, and let the rest follow.

What else the platform does here

How the linking works is set out on the product site: linked strategies, shared goals and indicators, sub-actions across plans, and the action overview across every OGSM.

The full description of this phase, with screenshots.

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We set the environment up, handle the security and take the user questions. What we cannot do is have the conversation where a director hears that their plan is not achievable. That is what they call you for.