If you are reading this you have probably already decided to use OGSM, and are now deciding whether to pay for something. So let us be useful rather than promotional.
Do you need software at all
Honestly, not to start.
You can write a perfectly good OGSM on a whiteboard, and plenty of the best plans we have seen began that way. Creating the plan is a conversation, and a conversation does not need a database.
Software starts to matter when execution starts. Specifically, at four moments:
When more than a handful of people report progress. One person maintaining a plan is fine. Eight people updating the same document is not.
When you want a trend rather than a snapshot. A spreadsheet holds today’s number. Steering needs the line: where the KPI was three months ago, and whether it is moving the right way.
When the rhythm needs to survive a busy quarter. The monthly review is easy to hold in March and easy to skip in June. Scheduled sessions and automatic reminders are unglamorous, and they are what keeps the habit alive.
When more than one team has a plan. This is the real threshold. Two connected plans is a conversation; twenty is a system.
If none of those apply to you yet, use a spreadsheet with our blessing and come back when they do.
And when you do come back, you do not start over. OGSM.online imports an Excel plan, so the plan you already built in a spreadsheet becomes your first OGSM in the tool rather than an afternoon of retyping. That matters more than it sounds: the commonest reason teams stay in a spreadsheet too long is not the spreadsheet, it is the cost of moving.
What breaks in a spreadsheet
Since most teams start there, it is worth being precise about how it fails. It is rarely dramatic.
Every team invents its own OGSM. This is the one that costs the most and gets noticed the least. Hand out a template and within a quarter one team has added two columns for owners and quarters, another has split Measures into three tabs, a third has quietly turned the strategies into a task list. Each version is defensible on its own. Together they mean no two plans can be read side by side, no status can be rolled up, and every report has to be assembled by hand. If you want one way of working and one way of reporting, the format has to be fixed for you rather than by you.
Versions. Someone emails the plan, someone edits their copy, and within two quarters there are three plans and no way to tell which is current.
No history. A cell holds one value. When you overwrite the KPI with this month’s figure, last month’s is gone. Which means you can report status but not direction, and direction is the thing you actually steer on.
Reporting becomes someone’s job. Chasing eight owners for updates before every review is a real half-day, every month, forever. That person quietly becomes the reason the rhythm survives, and when they go on holiday it does not.
Coherence is manual. When a strategy changes at the top, someone has to remember which team plans referenced it. Usually nobody does, and the plans drift apart invisibly.
It is hard to read. A plan is supposed to fit on one page and be understood at a glance. Spreadsheets are very good at many things; being glanceable is not one of them.
None of that stops a determined team. It just costs more than it looks, and the cost is paid in attention rather than in money.
Four ways people do this
| Spreadsheet | Work-management tool | OKR platform | Dedicated OGSM tool | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One page, whole plan | Yes, if you build it | Rarely, the model does not fit | No place for strategies | Yes, it is the structure |
| Strategic choices captured | Yes, as loose text | No natural place for them | Usually left implicit | Yes, as a first-class element |
| One consistent format across teams | Every team builds its own | Possible, needs policing | Yes, the framework is fixed | Yes, every plan is an OGSM |
| History and trends | Latest value only | For tasks, not for measures | Per cycle only | Every measurement kept |
| Several people reporting | Versions and merge pain | Yes | Yes | Yes, with reminders |
| Review rhythm supported | You run it yourself | You run it yourself | By convention | Scheduled, with prepared reports |
| Plans connected across teams | Copy and paste | Possible, needs design | Varies by product | Linked, with live updates |
| Cost to start | Nothing | Often already owned | Per user, adds up | Per team, unlimited users |
| Best for | One team, first cycle | Delivery work, not strategy | Quarterly focus in autonomous teams | Executing a plan, one team or many |
A note on the work-management column, because it is the most common near-miss. Asana, Monday, ClickUp and their relatives are good at tracking work. They have no natural place for a strategic choice, and no concept of a measure that is tracked over time against a target. You can force it, and the result is a task list with an ambition pinned to the top, which is exactly the shape of plan OGSM exists to replace.
And on OKR platforms: if what you need is quarterly focus in autonomous teams, an OKR tool will do that perfectly well. So will this, as it happens, because OGSM runs on the same monthly and quarterly cadence: the difference is that the quarters get measured against a multi-year ambition instead of only against the last quarter. Either can work. Pick the one whose shape matches how you actually plan. The honest comparison is here →
Eleven things to evaluate
Whichever tool you look at, including ours, these are the questions that separate the ones that get used from the ones that get abandoned in month five.
1. Does the model shape the tool, or is it a template? A tool where OGSM is one of forty templates will fight you. The four blocks should be the data structure, not a layout.
2. Can a non-expert report progress in three minutes? If reporting is slow, it stops happening, and everything else is irrelevant.
3. Does it keep the history of every measurement? Snapshots tell you where you are. Only history tells you where you are going.
4. Can you run the two review sessions separately? Action review and strategy review answer different questions on different cadences. A tool that only has one kind of meeting will push you to merge them, which is the commonest way plans die.
5. What happens when there are twenty plans? Cascading, shared actions, reporting across plans. Ask to see it with realistic numbers, not with three demo teams.
6. How hard is it to set up permissions? Large rollouts stall on access management far more often than on features. Ask about groups, not just users.
7. Where does the data live? For European organizations this is often the first filter and the last thing vendors want to discuss precisely.
8. Can it be switched off? Specifically the AI. If your policy says no, you want a setting, not a support conversation.
9. Does it export cleanly? Excel and a PDF that is still one page. Also worth asking the awkward version: how do we get everything out if we leave?
10. What does it cost as you grow? Per-user pricing looks cheap at ten people and decides your rollout at four hundred. Per-team pricing behaves differently. Model your actual second year.
11. Is anyone accountable for the method, not just the software? A tool vendor who cannot tell you what makes a strategy a real choice will not help you when your plan is technically complete and substantively empty.
Where OGSM.online fits
We built this around three things, and they are the honest summary of the product.
The model is the structure. Objective, Goals, Strategies, Measures: with strategies as a first-class element that has an owner, KPIs and actions attached. Not a template on top of a generic tool.
Execution is the point. Progress reports that take minutes, traffic lights that roll up, scheduled action and strategy reviews with prepared reports, and a dashboard that tells a process owner who has not reported yet while there is still time to ask.
It scales by team, not by seat. Unlimited users on every plan, priced per team. Which means inviting the whole organization to see the plan costs nothing extra, and a plan nobody can see is not a plan.
Add to that: ISO 27001:2022, hosted in the Netherlands, backups and AI processing inside the EU, two-factor authentication and SSO with Entra ID on every plan. The detail is on the trust page →
And, since it is relevant to point 11: the method behind the product is written down. Remco Bakker co-authored the book on putting OGSM into practice, and the guides on this site are the same material.
Where it does not
Three cases where we are not the right answer, said plainly because you will find out anyway.
You want quarterly OKRs and nothing longer. If your planning genuinely resets every quarter and you have no interest in recording multi-year strategic choices, an OKR tool is the simpler fit. We would rather say that now.
You only want a task tracker. Plenty of teams do run their delivery here, and we are one of them: our entire product backlog sits in OGSM.online, connected to the strategies it serves. But that works because the work is hanging off a plan. If what you need is a standalone task or issue tracker, with no OGSM around it, there are applications built for exactly that and they will suit you better.
You are one person with one plan. A personal OGSM works beautifully on paper. Paying per team for it does not make sense until there is a team.
Questions to ask any vendor
Take these to us and to everyone else.
- Show me a plan with twenty connected team OGSMs, not three.
- Show me a progress report being filed, timed, by someone who is not on your staff.
- Show me the history of a single KPI over two years.
- What happens to my data if I cancel, and in what format do I get it?
- Where is it hosted, and which subprocessors touch it?
- Which AI provider, and can I switch it off?
- What does year two cost at three times our current size?
If a vendor is comfortable with all seven, you are probably in safe hands: ours or someone else’s.
Thirty days, no credit card, and it stops on its own.
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