When You Miss Your Goals: Is It the Plan or the Implementation?
The way you evaluate and analyze your performance based on the business plan is the guide for making your way along, and such evaluation must be a part of your job so you can identify the mistakes and avoid repeating them.
Evaluate according to the time period you define, such as monthly or weekly, and based on the small and secondary objectives you have set. The evaluation looks at three aspects. To what extent did you stick to the plan? What is your score in implementing the plan; that is, what percentage of progress have you achieved, and what score do you give yourself for this progress? To what extent have you accomplished your goals?
Along the way, from every failure, learn how to win in the future and change your course of action if needed. Turn your failures into opportunities. Great men whose words you follow have repeatedly failed on their way to realizing their ideas.
If you realize you are far away from achieving your goals, ask whether something was wrong with the business plan or with the way the plan was implemented. If the implementation has been problematic, adjust yourself to the setting or fix the methods, based on that famous flexibility rule. The business plan may be outdated, or it may have ignored many issues from the beginning for some reason.
There are several reasons you get to this stage. One is the changes that happen in the industry, in technology or in macro policies. Another is your competitors' performance, which you cannot predict. Therefore, you must strive for excellence at all times so that you will not be outdone by a competitor. Any of your competitors may suddenly make a move and astonish others, or introduce a product which significantly challenges other competitors. When the iPhone entered the market, the company would never have thought that Samsung could become its competitor with the same features and perhaps even more options.
The competition in the market is one of the determining factors in making grave changes to your course of action. Finally, if possible, run a test of your business plan experimentally on a small scale and measure the extent to which your goals have been realized. Have a long-term plan, but consider a short time for your runs and tests.