ISO 27001
Next quarter
your first capacity arbitration — not in 18 months.
The Quarter Plan.
Your quarterly capacity-arbitration system.
The ritual that makes what matters ship. Every 90 days, the entire portfolio is confronted with real capacity and benefits, with the obligation to decide. A method built with more than 60 CIOs and transformation leaders.
Already adopted by 100+ CIOs of mid-market companies and large groups
Kiabi · Valrhona · Leroy Merlin
Painless setup
you send your files, we deliver the portfolio.
No cost at 3 months
if the ritual doesn't take, you leave at no cost.
1/3 more projects completed
with informed arbitration.
15% of capacity recovered
your teams thank you.
80% fewer meetings
teams aligned asynchronously.
Everyone runs committees. Almost no one decides.
Most organisations' project governance has the symptoms, not the cure. Three failures keep coming back — always the same ones.
The annual rhythm
You arbitrate once a year, at budget time. By March the plan is already wrong, and there is no scheduled moment to fix it.
The invisible wall
No one sees teams' real capacity. You say yes to everything, teams climb to 130%, and everything slips at once.
The leaky memory
Decisions are made in meetings and evaporate. At the next committee you rehash the same topics, with no trace of what was decided.
A method isn't one more committee. It's what every other committee is missing.
Your teams' capacity has become the number-one arbitration variable.
For twenty years, leaders' question was: which projects should we launch? Budgets followed, teams adapted, and portfolios grew year after year.
That world is over. Project demand is exploding: transformation, regulation, and now AI spinning up ten project ideas a week in every department. Meanwhile capacity no longer grows: constrained budgets, headcount counted, teams already at 130% on paper.
For the first time, the limiting factor is no longer ambition. It's no longer the budget. It's the capacity to deliver. And that changes the leader's number-one skill: yesterday, launching. Today, arbitrating.
In this new world there are two kinds of organisation. Those that spread thin: everything is a priority, so nothing is. Every project moves, none gets done. And those that arbitrate: fewer projects in parallel, more projects completed, observed benefits that make each arbitration smarter than the last.
This discipline has a name: quarterly capacity arbitration. It doesn't require 18 months of rollout or a company-wide tooling change. It requires 3 hours a quarter from decision-makers, and a platform that puts demand, capacity and benefits on the same screen, with the obligation to decide.
One closing question, the only one that matters: how many projects did your organisation stop this quarter? If the answer is zero, it's not that all your projects are good. It's that no one has the mandate, the rhythm and the facts to decide. That is exactly what we install.
The method in detail
Four disciplines. Four building blocks to equip them.
Demand comes through one door: every request qualified (value, load, sponsor) before it exists. The portfolio is built by decision, not by accumulation.
Real capacity is the wall: per team, at quarter granularity, in net capacity. Saying yes to a project means saying no to another — knowingly.
Every 90 days, you decide: the entire portfolio under review — continue, stop, postpone. Decisions recorded, roadmap committed.
Benefits are observed: promised versus observed, in the room. Measurement cleans up everything upstream and makes each arbitration smarter.
A method born in the field, not in a consulting firm.
The Quarter Plan comes from more than 60 interviews with CIOs and transformation leaders (the CIO Revolution podcast), and from observing the same pattern: the governance models that work have a rhythm, a capacity wall and a memory of decisions. The ones that fail have tools. Thomas Poitau and Roland Bouchut are part of the journey.
The method is practised, and it is installed: its rollout comes with dedicated support.
Thomas Poitauformer Transformation DirectorCarmila
Roland Bouchutformer CIOAdecco GroupThe quarterly deliverable: the object that commits.
The Quarter Plan doesn't track phases, completion percentages or tasks. It counts in quarterly deliverables: what each team commits to delivering by the end of the quarter. It's the pivot object of the ritual — the one a manager can commit to, and the one you can verify.
Before
"The project is 70% done" — A percentage can't be verified and commits no one. A project can sit at 70% for three committees without anything really moving.
After
"The pilot will be in production at 3 customers by September 30" — A deliverable is there or it isn't. It can be observed, dated, discussed. That's what makes reviews honest.
Honest reviews: what the ritual really changes. You no longer debate feelings — you observe deliverables.
Does it fit?
Teams' real capacity, and their spare capacity.
The Quarter Plan starts with a truth: what teams can really absorb. AirSaas makes that capacity visible, at whatever granularity suits you.
Each team reports its capacity for the build. Projects consume it, and overload jumps out before you commit.
Teams with spare capacity and bottlenecks are immediately visible. You see at a glance where there's slack and where it's blocked — the numbers-backed case to reallocate, reinforce, or go find budget.
T-shirt sizing: no "planning to death" — a macro estimate per deliverable, accurate to plus or minus 10%, is enough to decide.
Simulate and decide
Test the scenarios, see the impact.
The heart of the Quarter Plan is finding, together, the scenario every team can hold. In the room, on facts.
Include, exclude, move. You arrange projects on the timeline, and team load recalculates live. You look for the realistic combination, not the wish list.
Several futures compared. Two or three scenarios side by side, and the exec committee arbitrates live on numbers. You decide — you don't just observe.
The trend across the year. Project the coming quarters to spot the ones that will be bottlenecked, and anticipate instead of absorbing the hit.
Delivery
The delivery rate: the indicator that credits those who do the work.
A plan is only worth what gets delivered. AirSaas tracks real progress and makes it legible.
The Quarter Plan completion percentage is the simple indicator that shows the organisation's ability to deliver what was planned. It finally credits the work of the teams that "do".
The delivery rate per team is the share of what was committed and actually delivered, team by team. You defend your teams with a number, and you see where to reinforce.
No more 80% of projects late because of priority changes and too-many-projects-in-parallel: what you validate at the start of the quarter can actually be done within the quarter.
Measure the gap
What was planned at the start of the quarter, against what actually happened.
It's the Quarter Plan's learning loop: comparing the starting plan to the actuals, continuously.
The planned / actual delta. What was committed at the quarter's launch, what was delivered, what slipped. The gap becomes a fact, not an impression.
Milestones added and removed. You see what was injected along the way and what was dropped, with the trace of the decisions. The quarter's memory.
A fairer next arbitration. Understanding why you drifted means estimating the next quarter better. Each cycle makes the next one more reliable.
AI that helps you
Build your Quarter Plan, assisted by AI.
Preparing a credible Quarter Plan means instructing and estimating fast. Three AI assistants do the heavy lifting.
The AI Brief and AI Milestone agents structure requests and help break projects into coherent milestones, ready to estimate.
The AI Estimate agent puts a first load on the milestones. After one quarter, 80% of milestones are estimated accurate to within three days, thanks to the benchmarks from your own past quarters. The more you use it, the more accurate it gets.
A circle that improves. Each quarter feeds the AI with your own data. The estimate isn't a generic model — it's the reflection of your organisation.
The ritual's numbers at our customers
90 days
the arbitration rhythm that replaces the annual arbitration — already stale by March.
80%
fewer project meetings after four months: the Quarter Plan replaces committees, it doesn't add to them.
3 hrs
per quarter asked of decision-makers. That's all the discipline that changes everything costs.
KIABIVALRHONALEROY MERLINCHIESIINTUISGT SOLUTIONS
"The 90-day ritual replaced half of our committees. We decide faster, and the decisions hold."
Transformation Director, group
80%
fewer project meetings after four months
Frequently asked questions
The Quarter Plan is a lighter version of PI Planning, stripped of the SAFe jargon and fitted to mid-market companies and organisations that aren't fully agile. You keep the best of it (the quarterly rhythm, the demand/capacity alignment, teams' commitment) without imposing the whole SAFe framework.
Yes, and some start that way: the guide is public. The platform makes the ritual sustainable over time: living capacity, in-session scenarios and the memory of decisions are the first things that collapse on a spreadsheet.
The Quarter Plan replaces some and lightens many others. Our customers see 80% fewer project meetings after four months: the method doesn't add on, it substitutes.
Six weeks of rollout, then the first Quarter Plan takes place within the quarter. It's usually at that first session that the first projects are stopped or postponed.
The Quarter Plan builds on fundamentals
The method doesn't start from scratch: it orchestrates practices we document in depth, freely available.
Steering committee
The Quarter Plan lightens your committees, it doesn't remove them. To structure the ones that remain: our steering committee guide.
Capacity planning
No honest arbitration without known capacity. The full practice: the capacity planning guide.
Portfolio management
Selecting the right projects before planning them: project portfolio management.
PI Planning & SAFe
The Quarter Plan is its lightweight version. The original framework: PI Planning — and the SAFe Program Increment.
Project steering tools
What the platform equips day to day, from flash report to portfolio: project steering tools.
Project management KPIs
Deciding quarterly means measuring what matters: the KPIs that actually count.
See what AirSaas would change for you.
A 30-minute demo on your context. We show you the ritual, you judge.