Running a Small Business

Lesson 3: Organization and Planning

Tracking progress

The first component of making sure that you get to where you're going is to determine how you're going to get there. That's the route you're going to take and you need that before you can do anything else. But, once you get going, you have to track the progress that you're making to ensure you're going to get to where you're going and on time.

Your goals are clearly defined in terms of what you have to achieve, how you're going to achieve it, when you're going to achieve them and how you'll know when you've achieved them but it isn't much use to realize, when the time comes, that you didn't make it. That's where tracking your progress comes in.

Progress is tracked on two levels - the tiny steps which you have planned and scheduled and the overall goal. Once you have your tiny steps defined and scheduled, you can add up their direct contributions to the overall goal and see how completing the steps will result in achieving your overall goal. It is likely that a lot of the steps are preparation so that there is no result in terms of the overall goal until half or more are completed. That's why you want to track on two levels - completion of the steps and achieving of the final result.

In terms of our increasing profit example, phoning around for new potential customers doesn't give you any more profit immediately but that progress still has to be tracked. Did you phone ten customers per day last week and did you get twenty new referrals? You have to evaluate progress with your tiny steps and track the results.

One way of doing that in an organized way is to use a paper planner or a computer-based organizer to track your tasks and their completion. Once you have completed the task and documented the desired result, the task is marked complete and you can go on to the next one. Again, I use MS Outlook for this function but any organizer will do. Many of the new hand-held machines will have an adequate tool for this.

At some point, after completing some of the tiny steps, you'll actually be delivering an order and booking profit. You will have anticipated this in your planning and will be able to check if the booked profit is according to plan at the time when it comes in. That's the second level of tracking - make sure you're not just going through the motions of tiny steps without actually getting closer to your final goal.

For more on tracking progress, try our recommended resource, "Project Management: Planning and Control Techniques." It gives more details on scheduling, critical path and bar charts to track work from a project management perspective.

Defining your goals, planning how to get there and tracking as you get closer - that pretty well guarantees that you will achieve what you set out to do. If everything goes as planned, it will. But, while travel is fairly predictable, business is not. Until you book the last dollar of that 20% profit increase, you can't break out the champagne. In business, you had better plan for failure and, sometimes it's even your own fault. More often it is unforeseeable events and, if you plan for such things, you can survive them as we'll se in the next sections.

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