Your organization’s goals are spelled out in budget and planning documents. Those goals are usually established at the beginning of the year. At the end of the year, you see if the goals were achieved. Do you really want to wait until the year-end?
Probably not. Year-end is too late to find out whether goals were met.
Tracking established goals is the best approach to manage your organization’s progress and avoid getting knocked off course. Organizations achieve their goals with tracking mechanisms that address these four areas:
- Result Areas – Think about what “success” looks like for your organization. Identify the outcomes, roles, and processes that are essential to achieving success. Result Areas may be specific to your industry or market. They can be financial, operational, or programmatic. Examples include achieving specific profit margins, quality standards, or market share.
- Indicators and Attributes – Select the outcomes, roles, and processes that are necessary to achieve the established goals. There’s a lot going on in your organization, and you can’t track all of it. Focus on the essential activities that MUST work for each goal to be achieved. Identify the information needed to get a view of what’s going on, and whether things are working well or not, such as financial, production, and employee reports.
- Collect and Report Data – Standard processes for collecting, tracking and reporting data helps ensure that information is reliable. Automation generally increases accuracy and makes it easier to obtain. Define “normal” profits, volumes, transactions, etc., to help recognize results that are abnormal, or “exceptions” that require more attention. Include all applicable stakeholders in defining normal vs. exception results.
- Analyze and Act – Review tracking reports and interpret them based on circumstances and established goals. Analyzing trends can help organizations see an issue early, before it grows to a crisis. Exception results should be assessed in an effort to understand what is causing the exception. Knowing the cause of the exception helps to identify corrective actions help get things back on course.
Don’t wait until year-end to see of your organization’s goals were achieved. Use these four tracking mechanisms to manage your organization’s progress and stay on course.