A business review is a chance for you to take the pulse off your organisation, to take a step back and examine your client relationships and how they could be improved. For many small- and medium-sized businesses, the question is how often should they be carried out – on a monthly or quarterly basis?

Here we weigh up the pros and cons, to help you get a better idea of whether you should carry out reviews on a month-by-month or quarterly basis.

Preparation Times

It’s worth bearing in mind that a network review takes time to prepare. Carrying out monthly reviews can mean that you’re kept fully up-to-date with where things stand but carrying out a review every month may not give those involved sufficient time to get ready. If your network reviews are held every three months or so, attendees have more time to think about what needs to be discussed and make sure they have all the information to hand. It’s better to hold more detailed reviews less often than to hold frequent but poorly planned ones.

Action Times

As with preparation times, it also takes time to go over the review, decide on a course of action and implement it. Monthly reviews can mean you’re swifter to take action when things go wrong, but there could be a grain of truth in the saying ‘only fools rush in’. If you’re holding reviews month by month, that doesn’t give those involved much time to critically weigh up the findings and decide how to proceed. If your network reviews are held quarterly, it gives people much more time to take a long, hard look at the results and make logical decisions on what changes need to be made for the long-term.

Outsourcing

Preparing for a review can take up valuable employee time which might be better used elsewhere. Outsourcing can be a way of ensuring your team stay focused on the things that really matter to the day-to-day running of your business, but that means you need the time to find a reputable company to outsource the review preparation to. If you decide to go for quarterly business review reports, that gives your outsourcing team much more time to collect the facts and figures which will ensure you have a more productive review.

If you would like a free IT network risk assessment, simply get in touch with the expert team at User One.