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In the October issue, I started a series detailing 7 common mistakes of business planning and how to avoid them. In this installment, we explore Deadly Mistake #7: "Not Tracking Results Versus Plan". If you missed the first six deadly mistakes, follow the link at the bottom left of this page and follow the newsletter link to "archive".

Deadly Mistake #7 Not Tracking Results versus Plan
Do organizations really do this? In my experience, this happens all the time. Companies go to all the trouble of creating business plans, but they don't put any process in place to consistently monitor their progress in a disciplined manner.

Understanding Why
Every company has different reasons why. For some, they really just need someone like you to help them put a process in place that they can stick to. For others, the culture of the firm may be to avoid confrontation. Of course, it's only when execution is off-track that confrontation might occur. The primary reason I see this issue is because the plans are not specific enough around timelines, accountabilities and measures of success to make tracking feasible. To help your client put a monitoring process in place, you should try to understand the reasons they don't monitor their progress now.

If the main reason is the lack of decent underlying plans to track against, helping clients create better plans is the best place to start. If the plans are good, you can probably set straight to work on a process to monitor progress. I have a few guidelines:

• Like planning, the best tracking of results happens frequently. Tracking progress versus plan works best on a monthly or quarterly basis.
• The tracking should be part of the planning cycle. Planning cycles are discussed in depth in in The Planning Boot Camp. For the purpose of this discussion, tracking should be the first thing to happen in every planning cycle. Look at the results of the last cycle before you plan for the next cycle.
• At least some of the tracking should be an integrated part of the planning documents. Every plan should have a report on progress versus plan in the last quarter.
• Make sure tracking happens consistently. Don't ever let it slide for a quarter. There must be an expectation that staff and managers will need to report their progress every quarter for example, or eventually progress will start to slip.
• Make sure that accountabilities in the plan are crystal clear, and that the ramifications for missing targets are equally clear, and followed through.
• Wherever possible, do some of the tracking in person. For example, a quarterly session of your client's Operational Planning Group is the best time to get managers to stand up, and tell their peers how they performed against their plans last quarter.

I hope that you enjoyed the 7 Deadly Mistakes series. If you missed any of the previous issues, go to the website and check the archives.

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