“He wasn’t bad; he got the information out there.”

“Hey, do you have a template I can fill out?”

“I got my deck down to 20 slides!”

“We don’t really do a formal business review. We just add it as an agenda item at the end of each quarter.”

I was speaking with a CEO client this week about the next round of his company’s version of Business Plan Reviews, (BPR’s and QBRs) He was scrambling to give people detail of what to include in their presentations and anticipating what guidance he already knew he wanted to give. He couldn’t remember much about the reviews in late July.

So how do we make our Quarterly Business Reviews less forgettable, and more useful for driving discussion, learning, decisions, and momentum into the following quarter? No one likes corporate monolithic presentations or discussions and presentations. They suck, and they invite micro management from the CEO and Board to, do this, don’t do that, and nitpicking at detail in an effort to find value in the sessions.

Don’t underestimate the number of hours that your people, and their teams spend preparing for these reviews, working on “decks” of one kind of another, sending slacks, emails, digging for data that they haven’t looked at since the last reviews. Too often the unstated goal is to get out of the review with as few dings as possible and as little added to an already overloaded team as possible. Forgettable becomes the goal. Below are a few ways to make business review working sessions useful to all participants.

Purpose:

• To discuss notable work completed, iterated, delayed and shelved over the course of the quarter and how that impacted the outcomes and metrics in ways we expected or not
• To coalesce learning, make decisions, and
• To decide on a vital few actions to create and accelerate momentum for the next quarter

Preparation:

• Consider whether PPT or a slide deck is the best way to communicate the quarter. Taking a break from decks can create better dialogue and decisions
• Share any information relevant to the review session 48 hours prior with commitment to arrive having reviewed the material
• A word on data and metrics. Having your data in a “not final” status is sufficient for a quarterly review. e.g. you cannot wait until the end of the first month of the next quarter to have a discussion and make decisions because your numbers are not final. If you have to dig to find your key metrics they are not good metrics because they are not driving decisions or action and/or your technology and process is not providing proper decision support
• Do not take multiple days of your staff’s time to prepare. They know how the quarter went
• Divide your presentation between keep the ship afloat/execution excellence work and change efforts that are requiring behavior, business, culture and organizational changes(creating the future efforts)

One Agenda: (60 min)

As the presenter, anchor your entire presentation on what, and why is it important.

15 min: Presentation

• What 2-3 key measures did you expect to impact? Why are they important,; how have your assumptions and views of those measures changed during the quarter.
• The work of the quarter is a story- We did these few key things, here is what we expected to get, how we did or didn’t get the outcome expected and what we learned
• Notable people and customer moments, improvements, contributions of the quarter
• What didn’t you do during the quarter, what were your top 5 or so distractions that got in the way of “the work”
• Known changes/plans for the next quarter

30 min Discussion

• Questions on material presented prior to the session
• Discuss key items around what is working and not working from the presentation and materials, identify improvement opportunities and options
• Are our people supported and challenged in the right balance?

15 min. Decisions and Communication

• What will we continue doing, stop doing, and start doing in the next quarter
• What is key to communicate, who is accountable

This approach is obviously non-exhaustive but is intended to make your business reviews less forgettable, more useful and provide you with a starting point to make the effort valuable as a part of any organizations operating system. On a last note, there are enough AI options now for recording, transcribing and summarizing the session to make it a standard part of the session and allows more automated follow-up and communication from the session.

Best of luck!