Master the Future: Discover the Quarter Plan Secret to Project Control in 2026!

In mid-2025, a company happily reports that it has been “on budget” for eight months. Expenses are in line with forecasts, month after month. However, upon closer inspection, it’s revealed that the company has under-delivered by 50% over the same period. In other words, it spent what it planned to spend… to produce half of what it intended to. When adjusted for actual deliverables, its budget has skyrocketed. But this went unnoticed because no one was measuring anything beyond the euros spent.

This scenario is not unique. It reflects the everyday reality of many companies.

Two decades of IT and business alignment… yet the same old issues persist

For twenty years, the talk has been about strategic alignment between IT and business sectors. CIOs have implemented numerous frameworks, certifications, and steering committees. Yet, the problems persist.

Look around as 2025 draws to a close: 47 concurrent projects, teams overloaded at 180%, IT budgets swelling by 30 to 40% annually. Despite all this, crucial strategic initiatives are stagnating. Transformation projects drag on for years. Business units are waiting. Top management is growing impatient.

This isn’t a problem of skill or budget. It’s a governance issue with the capacity to execute.

But recognizing that we can’t do everything is essential. Yes, dear executive board member, it’s a harsh reality: your company has limits. The question isn’t about denying them but deciding what to do with them.

The diagnosis we are reluctant to make

You might have quarterly rolling forecasts on your financial results, industrial KPIs, competitive standing, and major customer projects. But what about the delivery of your internal projects, especially those with a significant digital component? There’s either a deafening silence or, worse: PowerPoint reports that nobody reads.

Here’s the truth that no one speaks in board meetings: the project portfolio has been delegated to IT or the Project Management Office (PMO) as if it were merely a technical matter. This is a fundamental mistake.

The project portfolio is at the heart of your ability to decide what will be done and what won’t. It’s where your strategy materializes. It’s the tangible expression of your priorities.

As long as top management doesn’t take back this issue, they suffer the future rather than choose it. They let chance, the urgencies of the moment, and internal power dynamics decide what will be delivered by year’s end.

You have 100 good ideas and the capacity to execute 20. The question isn’t how to do more. The question is: who decides which 20?

The true cost of your projects

Look at your 2025 plan that just ended. What was the “remainder to be done” from 2024? In many companies, it accounts for 40% of the annual plan. Nearly half the year is spent finishing what should have been delivered the previous year.

This is a symptom of a system that no longer knows how to say no. It keeps piling on commitments without considering actual capacity. It launches projects without ever stopping them.

The cost is threefold:

• Waste of capacity: your teams are spread too thin across too many fronts, and no project truly progresses.
• Zombie projects: initiatives that never die but also never deliver anything substantial.
• Failure to steer: you can’t answer the simple question: “If we delay this project by three months, what do we gain? What do we lose?”

Without this visibility, each request for additional budget becomes a leap of faith. You grant 30 or 40% more without truly understanding what you’re buying.

Two strategies, one ratio to reverse

In most companies we encounter, the observation is the same: 80% of the time is spent post facto: calculating variances against the baseline, tracking delays project by project, explaining why things didn’t work, and looking for someone to blame. Only 20% is spent on planning, if at all.

The result: PMO units spend their lives producing reports that no one reads. Steering committees merely assess the damage instead of preventing it.

The goal is to reverse these proportions. Spend 20% measuring the gap between what we wanted to do and what we did. Spend 80% making delivery more predictable, helping teams commit to what’s realistic.

Consider a rally driver. After each stage, he checks in with his co-driver. But most of their work is looking ahead: what is realistic to plan for? What needs to be given up? Business and IT are similar. There’s a driver and a co-driver. Together, they set mutual, ambitious yet realistic commitments, supported by properly sized resources.

Let’s stop the wishful thinking. Let’s own our choices.

The true nature of a quarter plan, and what it is not

A quarter plan is not a project manager tool nor another report. It is a tool for sponsors and management.

Its principle? Each quarter, identify concrete deliverables that will be produced by specified skill groups. Not vague milestones, not percentages of progress: tangible deliverables.

The debate between Waterfall and Agile? It doesn’t matter. These are just details of how teams are organized internally. What matters at the executive level is having a shared, consistent view of what will be delivered this quarter and who is committed to it.

Quarter plan: How does it work?

The quarter plan revolves around a key ritual: the “quarter plan day.” A half-day to a full day, each quarter, where sponsors and teams meet, but it’s not a lengthy reporting session. It’s an active work session. Decision-makers are present. Decisions can be made. A project that has gone off track can be re-scoped. An underestimated workload can be reevaluated. A zombie project can be officially terminated.

This day replaces dozens of preparatory, alignment, and validation meetings. Because the right people are in the same room, at the same time, with the right data.

Quarter plan: What it enables you to measure

A quarter plan is more than a planning tool. It’s a measurement tool. Here are the indicators that make a real difference:

• Percentage achieved compared to planned: at the end of the quarter, how many of the committed deliverables were actually delivered? This is your reliability indicator.
• Team workload rate: are your teams chronically overloaded (>100%) or do you have some leeway? This is your sustainability indicator.
• Projects finished vs. projects launched: are you launching more projects than you are finishing? This is your discipline indicator.
• “Surprise” deliverables that emerged along the way: how many unplanned requests landed during the quarter? This is your environmental stability (or instability) indicator.

These figures tell a story. If you’ve achieved 60% of what was planned but 25% of “surprise” deliverables appeared during the quarter, you understand why. It’s a factual data point.

Quarter plan: What it unlocks for the executive committee

When your projects are broken down into quarter plans, when you have a consolidated and reliable view, you can finally simulate scenarios:

• “If we move the CRM project from Q2 to Q3, what capacity do we free up? What could we do instead?”
• “If we permanently stop the legacy project, how many full-time equivalents do we recover? What could we reallocate them to?”
• “If the regulatory project is delayed by 2 months, what is the impact on the rest of the portfolio?”

Today, you can’t answer these questions. Or if you can, it takes weeks of work to consolidate scattered data. With a mature quarter plan, these answers are just a click away.

That’s taking control. Being able to decide based on knowledge. Being able to choose between clear options. Being able to say yes or no with factual data.

Learn more about AirSaas

Common objections to the quarter plan, and why they are flawed

“We already have a breakdown”

Really? Is it uniform across all your teams? Do we all mean the same thing when we say “deliverable”? Do we have comparable granularity between IT, finance, and operations? In 90% of cases, no. Each department has its own vocabulary, its own framework, its own logic. The breakdown exists, but it’s not sharable.

“We don’t know how to break our projects into quarters”

That’s precisely the task at hand, and it’s a valuable one. When you force a team to define what it will really deliver in the next 90 days, you force it out of ambiguity. You expose the real difficulties, dependencies, and risks. It’s uncomfortable, but necessary.

The real issue isn’t technical. It’s the lack of a shared and global view on what the company can actually produce.

How to reverse the trend and start 2026 strong with a quarter plan?

There’s no one right way to launch a quarter plan. Here are four approaches that we see working:

1. The IT and finance duo on a key program: finance is often already mature in the quarterly rhythm (closures, forecasts, reporting). Pairing IT and finance on a joint initial program creates a powerful dynamic. The two departments align on a common language and set an example for the rest of the company.
2. The IT department on its own scope: the CIO initiates the quarter plan with his direct reports on the IT portfolio. It’s a good testing ground. The teams are used to a certain level of rigor, and the project vocabulary is already in place. The goal is to prove the value before expanding.
3. The executive committee on the top 20 strategic projects: the executive committee mandates quarter plan operations on the 20 most important strategic projects. The clear message: these projects will be managed differently. This is often the response to accumulated frustration (“I’m tired of not knowing where we stand”).
4. The most constrained teams: start with the teams that are suffering the most (infrastructure, flow, data). These are the teams that everyone demands something from, all the time, and who can no longer keep up. The need to prioritize is evident. The quarter plan finally provides a framework for saying no, or rather for saying “not now, and here’s why”.

In any case, Version 0 can last one to two quarters. This gives teams time to adopt the rhythm, the vocabulary, the rituals. Don’t seek perfection immediately.

“An effective quarter plan must be digitalized in a suitable tool”

A caution: if your quarter plan becomes a behemoth of PowerPoint and Excel, you’ve lost.

Form will overtake substance. Teams will spend more time updating files than delivering. Data will always be outdated. Consolidations will be torturous.

An effective quarter plan must be digitalized in a suitable tool, which allows real-time viewing of where commitments stand, tracks changes as they occur, and makes visible what has moved and why.

And today, AI is changing the game. Well integrated, it helps break down projects into coherent deliverables, size workloads, and detect dependencies that might have been missed. It doesn’t replace human judgment. But it significantly accelerates the structuring work that has hindered so many teams.

Because yes, there will be changes. A major client comes in with an urgent request. A key resource departs. An unforeseen technical issue arises. That’s normal. What matters is that these changes are tracked, visible, and their impact on the original plan can be measured.

2026: The year of taking control?

You’re starting a new year. You’ll likely approve a new budget, launch new projects, make new promises.

The question is: will you repeat the same pattern as in 2025? Stack up commitments, cross your fingers, and discover in December that 40% of the plan has slipped into 2027? Or will you decide that 2026 is the year your executive committee takes control of its capacity to execute?

100 good ideas. The capacity to execute 20. It’s up to you, together, to choose which ones.

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