Profitability
Innovation
Turning Intentions into Results5 Ways to Keep Your Plan from Gathering DustBy Peter Christian • Published October 2010 #3: Keep Score – Everyone is Watching Why is it so important to keep a score card? It’s all summed up in the classic Industrial Engineering adage of “you can’t measure what you don’t track”. So whether you call them benchmarks, KPI, goals, or something else, tracking progress creates measurements. Measurements allow you to evaluate where you are. From this vantage point, you can decide to either stay the course or change direction to achieve the desired results. 75% don’t link employee incentives to strategy The value of measurements couldn’t be more evident than in this story about Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. In the early years, a production manager purchased a $20,000 piece of equipment, which was a lot of money at the time, and promised to boost production to 2,000 pints of ice cream per hour. Ben Cohen (one half of Ben & Jerry’s) wasn’t on board with the purchase and stipulated that if the machine did not live up to expectations it would be sold. Using a simple sheet of plywood, the production crew created a sign with the goal of 2,000 and recorded the daily output on it. It was clear for everyone to see the target and how well they were doing (or not). Efforts were made to not only make, but to beat the goal. Once production hit the initial goal, the team didn’t stop, but continued until production eventually reached 4,000 pints per hour. The moral to the story…once employees could clearly see the measurements and results, they pushed even harder. Using measurements throughout the process facilitates the evaluation of your progress. Strategic Success Tip #3: Create incremental benchmarks for goals. If the goal is a 10% increase in sales over the next year, break that annual goal down into monthly goals. It will be feel more attainable. Recap...
> Next |
|