Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Objectives and Key Results (OKR) (23-slide PowerPoint presentation). Successful organizations are using Objectives and Key Results (OKR) now. OKRs are efficient way to track company and team goals and measure their progress. It helps every organization's success by cutting out unimportant goals and focusing on what truly is important within the organization.
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Also, if you are interested in becoming an expert on Performance Management, take a look at Flevy's Performance Management Frameworks offering here. This is a curated collection of best practice frameworks based on the thought leadership of leading consulting firms, academics, and recognized subject matter experts. By learning and applying these concepts, you can you stay ahead of the curve. Full details here.
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For those in management positions, it can sometimes be difficult to stay on top of all of the different ways that your company is making progress. Whether it’s increasing sales, gaining more market share, or reducing debt, it’s important that you’re able to have a consistent idea of your company’s standings.
Though it can seem overwhelming, there are ways that you can effectively track your company’s progress without driving yourself crazy. Having some guidance around useful techniques and practices can greatly impact your ability to stay clear on how your company is doing.
Here are four ways you can track your company’s progress.
Take Advantage of Consumer Analytics
Consumer analytics now offers businesses the opportunity to understand and track their customers in previously unprecedented ways. If this technology sounds complicated — don’t worry, it’s simpler than it sounds. Put simply, consumer analytics refers to the practice of collecting data about your consumers and analyzing it to help inform the business decisions that you make.
One of the biggest advantages of consumer analytics is the fact that it can allow your business to gain a thorough understanding of the exact types of consumers that are purchasing your products. As such, you have the ability to tailor your marketing efforts directly toward these typed of individuals, giving you more value for the money you spend on marketing. This is one of the main reasons that so many business professionals are becoming more curious about how consumer analytics can grow their businesses.
When it comes to tracking progress, consumer analytics allows you to use actual consumer data, which means there’s no guessing when it comes to tracking progress. With consumer analytics, you can accurately track the progress of things such as marketing campaigns and the amount of market share your company holds.
Given the effectiveness of tracking company performance with consumer analytics, implementing this process is an easy choice for organizations looking for ways to track their progress.
Keep Track of Company Data
When tracking your organization’s progress, it can be difficult to stay on top of all of the different areas of progress you’re trying to measure. By utilizing data, this process becomes far easier and more streamlined. Today, there is no shortage of software with data tracking capabilities. By utilizing this type of software, you’ll be able to gather all of the data you need to accurately track your organization’s progress.
To successfully sort through all of the company data that you collect, it can be useful to utilize the practice of data mining. Data mining is a process that is used to sort through data and identify various trends contained within data sets.
Many organizations are now implementing powerful data mining tools, techniques, and methods into their business processes and are experiencing the benefits of being aware of new trends in real-time. For those looking for ways to track how their company’s progress, utilizing data and the practice of data mining is an amazing way to do so.
Consistently Assess the Effectiveness of Employees
While consumer analytics and data can be great tools for measuring some things, it can get a little trickier when it comes to the performance of your business’s employees. While some employees, such as those in sales or marketing, can have data associated with their output, other roles may not. This being the case, your organization will have to decide how it sees fit to measure employee performance.
One tactic that many organizations engage in when it comes to assessing the effectiveness of employees is regular manager reviews. In these cases, those in leadership roles write reviews of the employees they manage on a consistent basis. By cultivating a practice of regular employee assessment, your company will be able to track the progress of employees more easily and effectively.
Be Aware of Competitors
Though in many cases your organization’s progress can be measured through in-house data, it’s important to be aware of your organization’s competitors and how they are doing in various areas. Having a grasp of other organizations in your industry allows you the chance to develop clearer standards to measure your own organizational data.
One significant way that staying aware of competition can benefit your organization is by having a bar to compare your results to. For example, though it may seem like your organization did extremely well and made enormous progress in a certain quarter, you may find that all of your competitors experienced the same amount of growth.
Bearing this in mind, you’d be able to recalibrate your measures of success and realize that the industry as a whole had a boost, not necessarily your organization. As you can see, staying aware of your organization’s competitors can offer you the chance to measure your organization’s progress more accurately.
Don’t Let Your Company’s Progress Elude You
Though tracking all of the various aspects of your company’s progress can sometimes seem complicated and overwhelming, taking advantage of a few key practices can transform this stressful situation into a manageable task.
So, before you throw in the towel and give up on tracking your company’s progress, give these practices a try and watch as they help your organization grow and thrive.
33-slide PowerPoint presentation
Organizations often face significant challenges in aligning their day-to-day operations with their long-term strategic goals. This issue of strategic misalignment is particularly detrimental to sectors like manufacturing, healthcare, and technology, where rapid decision-making and agility are
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Performance Management (also known as Strategic Performance Management, Performance Measurement, Business Performance Management, Enterprise Performance Management, or Corporate Performance Management) is a strategic management approach for monitoring how a business is performing. It describes the methodologies, metrics, processes, systems, and software that are used for monitoring and managing the business performance of an organization.
As Peter Drucker famously said, "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it."
Having a structured and robust Strategic Performance Management system (e.g. the Balanced Scorecard) is critical to the sustainable success of any organization; and affects all areas of our organization.
Learn about our Performance Management Best Practice Frameworks here.
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