Rolling 4—Quarterly Company Planning

Businesses and markets can change rapidly. Rolling 4—Quarterly Company Planning helps teams stay aligned, make better and faster decisions, and allocate resources effectively on a quarterly rhythm, so everyone’s work aligns to the company’s long-term goals.

PREP TIME

60m

Run TIME

4-6 weeks

Persons

6-50+

5-second summary

Review progress toward business, financial, and strategic goals.
Verify or adjust targets based on strategic pivots, market conditions, and the competitive landscape.
Define work plans for the coming quarters, and approve the resource allocations that will be needed to execute.

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

Video conferencing with screen sharing or meeting space.
Digital collaboration tool, such as Confluence.

PLAY resources

OKR Generator Rovo Agent

Change Management Communication with Video

Rolling 4 Template

How to do Rolling 4—Quarterly Company Planning

Look back and plan ahead to keep teams in sync as you drive toward your strategic priorities.

What is Rolling 4—Quarterly Company Planning?

Rolling 4—Quarterly Company Planning is a business planning approach that involves reviewing results for the past quarter and looking four quarters ahead, every quarter.

During Rolling 4, teams:

Reflect on strategy and progress toward strategic targets.
Refresh goals to stay focused on the strategy.
Align work and resources (positions and funds) to deliver on goals.

Why run the Rolling 4 Quarterly Planning Play?

Many companies do long-range planning to define the major goals and targets that teams will work toward over the course of 1-5 years. But what happens when the business, market, or environment changes? That’s where Rolling 4—Quarterly Company Planning helps.

This Play complements long-term planning to help your business adjust quickly to change. It’s a company-wide ritual that walks teams through several steps to help share and broaden knowledge, make better and faster decisions, and allocate resources more effectively.

If it’s not possible to do this type of company-wide quarterly planning quite yet, you could pilot this Play within a single focus area, department, or team. Then, share the results and learnings with others as a success story to drive wider adoption.

When should you do Rolling 4—Quarterly Company Planning?

Rolling 4—Quarterly Company Planning happens at the end of one quarter and wraps up at the beginning of the next one. That way, enough time has passed in the quarter to evaluate past results, but it’s early enough in the following quarter to adjust plans if needed.

This cadence ensures the teams who are doing the work have as much time as possible in the coming quarter to focus on delivery, instead of spending time trying to get aligned.

4 benefits of Rolling 4—Quarterly Company Planning

Research within and outside of Atlassian shows how aligning work to goals boosts the likelihood of success.

Regularly monitoring goals helps identify discrepancies, obstacles, unforeseen challenges, and/or areas needing improvement, which increases the chances of meeting those goals. (Locke and Latham)
An organization’s ability to sustain a competitive advantage in rapidly changing environments relies on “its ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external competences” – exactly what this Play is designed to do. (Teece, Pisano, & Shuen)
When an organization develops processes to sense changes in their environment, seize opportunities, and reconfigure resources and capabilities as needed, the company is more likely to achieve and sustain a competitive edge, respond faster to opportunities and threats, better allocate resources, and operate with more agility and adaptability. (Eisenhardt & Martin)
In Atlassian’s State of Teams 2025, survey respondents who said their team transparently shares their goals and documents regular process updates were 6x more likely to produce high quality work, 2x more likely to focus their team on work that matters most, and nearly 5x more likely to meet deadlines.

1. Pre-work: Define long-range plans

Rolling 4—Quarterly Company Planning is meant to complement long-range planning, not to replace it. If your executive team hasn’t done so already, work with them to create a long-term vision, objectives and key results (OKRs), and strategy for the next year.

Tip: Connect with an executive sponsor

As with any big, new initiative or process change, stakeholders and collaborators may be hesitant or resistant to Rolling 4 at first. Having an executive sponsor who shares their vision and advocates for this process can help gain buy-in, remove roadblocks, and make decisions faster and easier.

Tip: Write better OKRs with Rovo

Teams with clear goals are 20% more likely to be productive. Use the OKR Generator Rovo Agent to harness the power of AI and write clear goals that help your team make progress on work that matters.

2. Prep the Play

Est. time: 30 MIN

In month one or two of the quarter, schedule a meeting or record a video using a tool like Loom to walk stakeholders through what Rolling 4—Quarterly Company Planning is, why it’s valuable, and an overview of the process and timeline.

Show how this ritual will help:

Reflect on strategy and progress toward strategic targets.
Refresh goals (as needed) to stay focused on the strategy.
Align work and resources (positions and funds) to deliver on goals.

Also, describe how Rolling 4—Quarterly Company Planning is a process that’s informed by several “inputs” or pieces of information from individual teams:

Performance against key business and financial metrics (KPIs)
Performance against goals (OKR scores)
Performance against strategy and market assessment
Resource allocations
Roadmaps and dependencies

Set clear expectations with stakeholders on the rituals, timelines, roles, and responsibilities so they can start preparing.

TIP: GET FEEDBACK EARLY

Share your initial poster with project sponsors as early as possible to get their feedback, which you'll incorporate in future sessions as the project develops.

3. Create and communicate the plan to stakeholders

Est. time: 15 min

Develop a plan that outlines each “input” ritual that needs to be completed, the timeline, and who is accountable.

Ritual	Audience	Who’s Typically Accountable	Recommended Timing*
Ritual Step 1: Metrics & Financial Review	Audience Executives	Who’s Typically Accountable Finance + portfolio or division leaders	Recommended Timing* Last month of the quarter, Week 1
Ritual Step 2: OKR Review	Audience Executives	Who’s Typically Accountable OKR owners	Recommended Timing* Last month of the quarter, Week 2
Ritual Step 3: State of the Business	Audience Executives	Who’s Typically Accountable Portfolio or division leaders	Recommended Timing* Last month of the quarter, Week 3
Ritual Step 4: Allocation Meeting	Audience Executives	Who’s Typically Accountable Portfolio or division leaders	Recommended Timing* Last month of the quarter, Week 4
Ritual Step 5: Work Planning	Audience Portfolio or division leaders (e.g., Program Management and Engineering)	Who’s Typically Accountable Portfolio or division leaders + delivery leaders	Recommended Timing* Last month of the quarter, Week 4 through the beginning of the next quarter

*Note that your company may need more or less time depending on its size and complexity.

TIP: SHARING IS CARING

After the session, share lessons learned with your team and others, and ask if they have any recent learnings too.