As a manager or business owner, you know how important it is to track your goals. Saying it, however, is much easier than doing it! Do any of the statements below sound like you?
How have you tracked achievement of objectives and goals in the past?
- Joe does it
- Team leader does it
- We haven’t done any real tracking
- It’s an impossible challenge, we just focus on getting through
the day
How successful have you been at meeting your goals?
- We don’t know
- Can meet them sometimes
- Haven’t given it much thought
- Never meet them
How do you know you were successful or not successful?
- No one complains
- Someone calls and says they’re missing something
If you never track your performance,
- How do you know if you’re successful?
- How do you know what is/is not effective?
- What criteria do you use to determine work flow, roles, responsibilities, and time requirements?
It’s important for you to understand the value of measurement when committing to goals. If it seems like a mundane, busy-work task, it will not get done.
All work that is performed consists of inputs and outputs. For example, if my goal is to have a cup of coffee, the inputs are the ground coffee beans, water, coffee pot, and coffee filter. The work that must occur is preparing the coffee pot and turning it on. The desired output is a good cup of coffee. Simple huh?
Take a look at your major goal.
- What are the inputs necessary for completing this goal?
- What work must occur to achieve the goal?
- What does the successful output look like?
How do I know if I successfully met my output when making a cup of coffee? As it perks, the wonderful bean aroma drifts through the air and makes me impatient for the pot to complete its cycle. And when I taste the coffee, I silently (or not so silently) say “Ummmm, good.”
But what if the coffee tastes terrible? Was I successful? If I don’t remember how I made it, or I didn’t measure the coffee grounds when I put them in the filter, how will I make a better cup next time?
Tracking my goal helps me repeat the successful results time and again. This is a simplified example of why you need to track your achievements and evaluate your business or department performance. Tracking and measurement enable you to make changes wherever necessary to become more effective. The emphasis here is on what gets done, not what we do.
Once the work has occurred and the output is created or provided, look at the success or failure of the product or service in comparison with the measurement criteria you established up front. This comparison should generate numerous “why” questions.
To determine the answers to these questions, you need to look at the various attributes that were part of the work delivery. Attributes are people, process, technology, and environment. What other attributes may come into the picture for your goals?
Once you’ve determined the answers to the whys, the next step is to feed that information back into the process you use for creating the next output. This feedback process is also known as continuous improvement. This process builds quality into the work that you do. And we all want to provide a high quality product or service. Right?
Denise O’Berry (aka ‘Team Doc’) provides tools, tips and advice to help organizations build better teams. Find out more at http://www.teambuildingtips.com
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