Your AOP Isn’t Your Operating Cadence.
Most BU monthly reviews I’ve sat through spend 60-70% of the airtime explaining why actuals missed plan. By Q2, everyone already agrees the plan is wrong. By Q3, we’re still grading ourselves against it. I’ve watched this pattern at every company I’ve worked at: Intel, Symantec, Flex, Huawei, VMware, Broadcom. It’s almost always the same story. The team isn’t lazy. They built the wrong thing & called it cadence.
So what’s the difference? An AOP is a capital-allocation artifact. Its job is to answer, once a year, where we’re placing our bets & what return we expect. A cadence is different. It’s how the org senses the market, adjusts, and re-allocates attention week to week. The AOP is made of commitments. The cadence is made of decisions. When the monthly review becomes an AOP autopsy, you stop learning anything from it.
I spent three years at VMware designing a BU cadence that was deliberately separated from the annual plan. The AOP set the envelope. But the monthly rhythm was built around three questions only: what changed in the market, what’s now at risk in our number, and what decision does this forum need to make this month? We ran a weekly pipeline & bookings pulse, a monthly ops review centered on KPIs and the top three risks, and a QBR where strategy actually got revisited. When Broadcom acquired us, that separation mattered. Broadcom’s operating model is demanding on margin discipline. If your monthly is still litigating the AOP, you’ve got nothing left for the harder conversation about what to stop doing. The BUs that expanded margin through the integration were the ones whose cadence could absorb a new owner’s forcing function without collapsing. I saw the same pattern on a smaller scale years earlier at Intel, on the Mobile Platform Group. When silicon roadmaps slipped, teams with a decision-grade cadence pivoted in weeks. Teams using the AOP as their cadence were still defending the original plan a quarter later.
Here’s the diagnostic I offer operators I advise now: look at your last three monthly BU reviews. If more than half the airtime went to explaining why actuals deviated from plan, you don’t have a cadence. You have an AOP autopsy on a loop. A real cadence produces decisions, not explanations. It surfaces risk before it becomes variance. And critically, it survives leadership changes, re-orgs, and acquisitions, because its purpose doesn’t depend on a plan document that’s already aging the day it’s signed.