"Help! I don't know what work my team is working on. I can't see it in one place. I don't know who is working on what? My team is telling me that they are busy and don't have capacity. They are overloaded and have too much demand.
Yet, I don't know if they are working on the right things? I try and give them clear priorities, but it doesn't seem to help. The team is telling me that there is too much demand and dependencies from other teams.”
Does this sound familiar?
This is a conversation that I regularly have with leaders who have:
🔍 Invisible work
🛑 Limited flow
😞 Unclear accountability
🔄 Misalignment
A quarterly cadence can be a ninja move to solve for these challenges.
What is it?
A quarterly cadence is part of a regular heartbeat that exists in an organisation to review, adapt, align and act.
Characteristics of a Quarterly Cadence
1. It is enterprise-wide and connects strategy to execution.
It is an opportunity for all Business Units and their teams to communicate their goals and intent. It helps to make sure everyone is pulling in the same direction, bringing alignment.
A quarterly cadence allows for a more coordinated planning effort, shifting the focus to outcomes over outputs. This bi-directional flow of information between leaders and teams helps bring strategic alignment.
2. It is an opportunity for teams to share what support they need from leaders.
Often we cannot see the work that is in the system, meaning we cannot know the impact we are having, or support required.
For teams, the quarterly cadence is an opportunity for them to provide visibility of the work and to share if they need more of a certain capability, resource, or support.
3. It allows leaders to share updates on strategic direction and priorities.
For leaders, as the environment the business operates in changes, it allows them to share updates with teams on any changes in direction or new priorities that require focus.
It is not uncommon to see situations where there has been a difference in expectations between what leaders were expecting and what a team has delivered. A quarterly cadence allows for this expectation to be continually managed by both parties.
4. It is a mechanism for change.
Change is always happening in teams, but it is not always realised. Introducing a forcing mechanism in the cadence to reflect and adapt means there is a continuous opportunity to measure progress and pivot as required.
We are in a busyness pandemic. Many organisations have too much work in progress and as a result fail to finish to deliver work end-to-end. A quarterly cadence, paired together with an annual cadence, means clarity can be provided on priorities. Teams can then learn to limit their work-in-progress and increase flow.
What is it not?
It is not a one-time big event.
It is not a status update.
It is not a top-down push of direction and work.
It is not a bottom-up build of projects.
It is not an opportunity to horse-trade 'resources'.
How to set-up up a quarterly cadence?
Get started by considering your quarterly cadence as a product. This means that it needs a strategy, backlog, roadmap and a cross-functional team to work on it! Consider engaging with the PMO/VRO, Strategy, Finance, Business Units, IT and HR.
Before you start co-designing the process, be clear on the design principles that you will use. Here is a set of principles that we have used as a starting point to tailor to suit the context:
There are 4 steps to consider in your quarterly cadence design:
1. Reflect - to review what you've learned, what you have achieved or not and why, what has changed both internally / externally, and to assess how you're doing against the 1-year outcomes.
2. Adapt - to stop/start/continue or pivot for the quarter ahead.
3. Align - to align on priority and do-ability. To make decisions to move forward.
4. Act - to plan for the quarter!
Consider who the users are of the quarterly cadence. So that you can take a customer-led approach to the design!
There are 3 personas to think about.
Enterprise – To support the ELT who are responsible for multi-year and annual strategy execution in service of enterprise goals with visibility on progress quarterly and monthly.
BU / Portfolio – To support each Business Unit (BU) leader who is responsible for their own multi-year and annual strategy execution in service of their BU goals with visibility on progress quarterly and monthly.
Value Streams and Teams – To support Value Stream leads and within their teams who are responsible for delivery of in-year outcomes with connectivity to the team’s work.
Introducing the Living Memo
A key artefact that you might consider introducing to enable your quarterly cadence is a Living Memo. It serves as a data capture mechanism for key data within the portfolio of work. I have seen this be a helpful move away from the detailed Business Cases at the project level to Outcome definition for the Value Stream.
The Living Memo creates the connection between strategy to execution to establish the 'golden thread of value' - from 3-year, 1-year, quarterly outcomes to the initiatives/epics teams are delivering. When all the portfolio of work is set-up this way, this helps ensure that you are working on the right things!
Note: When the Living Memo is codified by tooling, this doesn't need to be a PPT / spreadsheet or Confluence page.
To access a ready-to-use Living Memo template click here!
Considerations to get started
Consider the data and tooling that you need to enable the right conversations to happen.
Visualise the work to get shared understanding of what work is in the system. This is a good place to start. This can be v1 of your quarterly cadence.
Consider where the best area is to start. Either shallow and broad across the enterprise or narrow and deep within a Business Unit. My advice is to ‘just get started.’ It takes 3-4 quarters to get into the rhythm of a quarterly cadence.
To deep dive further into this topic, check out the webinar presented by Mark Payne, Eugene Chung, Sam Yeats and Maria Muir (July 2024) on the BVSSH YouTube channel.