Monitor an organisation

Establishes a shared understanding of why an organisation exists, defines the measures and targets to be used as evidence of its success and monitors its progress against those measures.

Business context

Corporate plans, business plans, annual reports, monthly reports - organisations use a range of reporting methods to provide confidence to themselves and their stakeholders they are on the right track.

These reports usually focus on things that can be easily measured but often provide poor evidence that valued outcomes are being achieved.

Benefits of using this practice

This practice will:

  • support a cyclic program that validates whether an organisation or its parts are delivering benefits of high value to the organisation;
  • help shape and support programs that enable an organisation to gauge the impact of any part of the organisation and then validate or adjust organisational strategies; and
  • reduce the ambiguity of terms and measures used across an organisation in corporate planning and reporting.

General approach

There are four steps involved in this exercise. The first two steps define why the organisation needs to exist and how it is responding to this need. A set of measures and targets are then established to provide evidence of its success.

The third step (benefit validation) is conducted as part of a corporate cycle to determine whether the outcomes are being delivered as expected.

Step 4 is also a cyclic exercise that questions whether the responses taken by the organisation to deliver the outcomes are the most effective or if different approaches should be adopted.

  1. Organisational expectation
  2. Benefit definition (organisation)
  3. Benefit validation (organisation)
  4. Organisation effectiveness

Executed properly, this practice will bring together a mix of people from across the organisation and should provide clarify of the purpose of the organisation to its employees and stakeholders.

Reviewed 16/05/2018
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