September 2025. You come out of your annual budget review with an observation that chills your blood.
18 million euros invested in business transformation, process optimization, and IS modernization. Three years of strategic projects. Mobilized teams. Consultants paid a high price.
The result? 30% of goals achieved. 70% organized waste.
You are not alone. In the corridors of French ETIs, the same admission is being circulated off the street: “Our transformations never really succeed.”
However, it is not for lack of vision. No budget. Not even talents.
The problem lies elsewhere. Deeper. More structural.
It is nestled in this collective inability to synchronize strategic ambition with operational reality. In this chronic desynchronization between what COMEX decides in January and what the teams can really deliver in December.
Midsize businesses are now navigating a world that even the best dashboards didn't anticipate. A world where margins are shrinking faster than trade-offs, where digital and environmental transitions converge without coordination, where policy cycles are shortening and regulations are multiplying.
This forum is not a plea for one more tool. This is an observation shared by lucid leaders: the problem is not the vision, it is the rhythm.
In many SMEs, governance is based on a reassuring but dangerous conviction: following six strategic projects means managing the organization.
The CEO presents his matrix. The DAF details its monthly points. The DSI exposes its backlog. The Chief of Staff summarizes. Everything seems to be under control.
Because behind these few “visible” projects, lies a completely different reality:
🧠 Insight #1 👉 Focusing on the only “flagship” projects without a global vision means driving by looking only at the rear-view mirror.
🧠 Insight #2 👉 Real strategic risk never comes from what you're watching, but from what you've stopped watching.
Take a step back from your management tools.
For your sales, you have a modern CRM: real-time pipelines, conversion rates, forecasts updated daily.
For your finances, you manage with consolidated BI, automated reporting, reliable KPIs that give the pulse of the company.
And for your transformation projects — the ones that determine your future competitiveness? You have shared PowerPoints and Excel tables.
While all support functions have operated their digital revolution, project governance has remained artisanal:
The contrast is striking: these same companies that track every euro in turnover and analyze each customer conversion are browsing their most structuring investments at sight.
🧠 Insight #3 👉 The project maturity of SMEs is 15 years behind their commercial maturity. Paradoxical when the future depends on their ability to transform.
🧠 Insight #4 👉 Managing without visibility into schedule and resource drifts means silently programming failures.
Another scourge is eating away at the management of ETI: asynchronous decision-making.
Around the same table, four temporal worlds coexist without ever meeting:
Faced with blockages, reflexes are predictable:
This temporal cacophony explains why so many transformations are getting bogged down. Not because of a lack of vision or resources, but because of the inability to create a common tempo of execution.
Teams run in aligned directions, but at incompatible speeds.
🧠 Insight #5 👉 In ETI COMEXs, the real problem is not strategic disagreement, but the structural time lag.
🧠 Insight #6 👉 Without a shared pace of execution, the best strategy becomes a catalog of good intentions.
Faced with this chronic desynchronization, a practice is gaining ground in the most mature COMEXs: the quarter plan.
Attention: this is not just another quarterly steering committee. The difference is fundamental.
A classic COPIL looks in the rearview mirror: “Where are we? Why the delay?”
The quarter plan looks to the horizon: “What can we actually achieve in the next 90 days with our current resources?”
It is a governance discipline that imposes a new organizational rhythm, centered on two pillars:
The principle: every 90 days, three non-negotiable exercises: ✅ Comprehensive review of the real portfolio of projects ✅ Assessment of available capacities by department
✅ Assumed arbitrations: what advances, what slows down, what stops
🧠 Insight #7 👉 In the current economic context, reducing the waste of internal resources has become an imperative for survival.
🧠 Insight #8 👉 The quarter plan does not constrain the strategy: it finally makes it executable.
Directorates-general that have switched to quarter plans are observing three profound changes in the way they operate:
Revolution in prioritization : no more endless debates on “medium priority” projects. Time constraints force decisions. A project is either in the quarter or it is not.
Transformation of arbitrations : the scope of projects now adapts to the resources available, and not the other way around. Scope creep — this natural drift that makes projects grow — finally becomes manageable.
Organizational sync : all directions work at the same speed. A single calendar replaces the cacophony of individual schedules.
The quarter plan reveals a managerial truth: time constraints free the decision.
🧠 Insight #9 👉 The quarter plan does not mechanically improve your projects. It transforms your COMEX into a real steering body.
🧠 Insight #10 👉 Knowing how to say “no” at the right time is worth every roadmap in the world.
The era of formal governance is over.
The DG's three-year strategic plans, ambitious roadmaps and six flagship projects are no longer enough to navigate the current complexity.
What will separate successful SMEs tomorrow from those that are stagnant will be neither their investment capacity nor their technological sophistication, but their control of the organizational rhythm.
The difference lies in this collective ability to synchronize strategic vision and operational execution, to adjust continuously without losing track.
The SMEs that will succeed in the years to come will be those who have understood this evidence: in a volatile environment, the real strategic competence is not to predict the unpredictable, but to adapt quickly when the unexpected occurs.
🧠 Final insight 👉 In a constantly changing world, the real managerial luxury is no longer having a perfect strategy. 👉 It's having a strategy that can be intelligently readjusted every 90 days.
