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BUSINESS MONITORING – A NEW EVALUATION APPROACH As the company develops, the demands for achieving continued growth will change. The start up company faces structural challenges; the established company by contrast faces operational demands. These operational demands can only be understood and managed by effective monitoring, from which the company can learn and develop. One of the contributions of Ibis to understanding the effective business plan is the emphasis that the research has placed on effective monitoring; the ability of the company to do, measure, and redirect resources. Most companies only monitor their activities through a very limited set of tools. This means that they will often fail to:
Ibis over the years has developed a detailed understanding of the way in which improved monitoring can drive profitability, enhanced customer loyalty and greater personnel satisfaction and commitment. There are three core features of an effective monitoring system. It must have:
Obviously, a detailed monitoring system makes demands on the company, and only becomes practical at a certain stage in growth. We tend to consider that when the company has reached the stage of 2 managers in each key function such as finance, production/ service delivery, marketing, that the structured development of a full monitoring system will become a realistic option. This is typically equivalent to a turnover of 2 million euros, though this will vary from sector to sector. No company or organisation can introduce a complete monitoring system overnight. It requires a detailed project plan. Ibis has developed a standard sequence of introducing structural, information systems and content which works for the majority of organisations; but in each case there need to be minor modifications to ensure that the management team remain committed and interested to the project. As the number of components that must be integrated is large the development of the monitoring system becomes part of the growing monitoring system, and is self-reinforcing. The monitoring quiz Like most quizzes, the answers that you get will be qualitative – and will be greatly driven by your honesty in answering the questions as accurately as possible. Remember that few of these questions are relevant to most small organisations, where a more basic monitoring and control system is still important, though less comprehensive. The grading scale that this quiz uses is also based on a judgement of how far the organisation has proceeded with the monitoring development. The five options are: A complete installed system is one which meets industry best practice; A partial system which functions, but does not meet industry best practice; A system which is being created with some of the mechanisms/ systems but not they are not formalised; A company thinking about system development - aware of the problem but has only very limited systems in place at present; A company which sees no need at all indicates that this has no information on the topic and has no plans to integrate it into the monitoring system.
Remember that this is designed for the medium sized enterprise, so if you are an early stage company this is not for you.
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Your score:
330 You know that you have cheated....
240 – 328 Your organisation is well on the way to becoming knowledge centric, and with concentration on key missing elements will be able to take continuing advantage of profitable opportunities in the market, while engaging your key staff, and identifying and managing problems before they become critical.
180 – 238 Your organisation has started to identify some of the challenges involved in managing change and development. By improving structure, systems and content you will be able to move the company towards becoming knowledge centric.
120 – 178 Your organisation is missing many components which will substantially improve operating performance. Establishing a project plan to install these components will provide substantial returns on both time and money.
66 – 118. Your organisation will find it practically impossible to grow and develop without many of the vital monitoring components. Review your monitoring policy as a matter of urgency.
19 March 2007 15:27:27
