Integral to making sure that execution stays on track, it is important to keep a close eye on results.  This means that having a goal isn’t enough by itself. You also need to have some system of tracking your movement towards that target. In the absence of a frequent reminder of how you are doing, there is no way for you to know if the actions you take are working or not.

On the business front, since there’s a whole team of people involved, entrepreneurs need to develop key indicators of performance that are measureable and monitored on a continuous basis. This will allow the executives to evaluate what is working and pursue these processes to enhance and promote performance. With declining results, businesses should decide what processes don’t work and to make changes to prevent any further deterioration.

This point should also take task delegation into account. This means assigning the right job to the right person. Remember how hiring the wrong person for the job could bring down a perfectly good strategy? Well this is what you want to avoid.

Being mindful of a project, meeting individual and team deadlines is crucial to continuously move a project forward. This can include sharing regular updates which ensures that everyone on the team has a comprehensive understanding of the progress and how every person’s input fits into the whole.

Even in non-business scenarios, tracking is essential for achieving goals. For instance, tracking progress helps everyone stay focused. A lot of people, not unlike businesses, fail to accomplish their goals not because they don’t possess the skills but because they lose track of what they want to achieve. Businesses, on the other hand, may have the correct strategy but can bungle up due to the various reasons already mentioned earlier.

Another consideration for tracking progress is that if you don’t track, you may end up focusing more on failures. It is natural for people to focus more on the negative side of things, so even after accomplishing something, a mishap may make you forget the earlier accomplishment. How many people have you known who have tried losing weight but then gained it all back again (or even weigh more than before!) simply because they got derailed from their initial diet plan for some reason?  Why even think about other people when this may have happened to you yourself?

Likewise, business scenarios demand that all progress and setbacks be recorded vigilantly to weed out the mistakes from the accomplishments.

In a strictly entrepreneurial sense, tracking progress makes breaking bigger tasks into smaller steps much easier. A big presentation due in less than a week when broken down into smaller tasks such as research, task delegation, data analysis and choosing the medium for the presentation makes the strategic goals so much more attainable, realistic and less overwhelming.