Monitoring
"One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programmes by their intentions rather than their results"
Milton Friedman
Many of the pertinent issues relating to monitoring have already been raised throughout the earlier stages of this guide. This is inevitable and serves to help illustrate that monitoring is not simply the final stage in a linear process, but one which is continuously addressed during all stages and woven into the processes of identifying your mission, vision and values and undertaking strategic activity. In many respects it is the counterpart to the continuous environment scanning that is required to ensure that you are aware of changes within or outside your institution that have the power to affect its strategic activity. Monitoring measures are likewise required to alert you as to how your activities are faring, where changes may be required and where operational necessities may demand an alternation to your agreed strategic objectives. The sooner any issues can be addressed (or indeed successes lauded) the better.
But at the same time it is a topic which is so important that it also warrants a particular focus of its own in order to complete the integrated and interdependent set of processes which are required to identify and achieve your strategic priorities.
What should we be monitoring?
Institutional Experience from Beaumont College
The type of monitoring activity that we discuss in this stage are designed to help the institution to answer the following three questions:
- how well are doing in pursuit of our agreed strategic objectives?
- are we still pursuing the right strategic objectives?
- are the ways in which we are pursuing our strategic objectives still fit for purpose
These can be summarised as:
- monitoring progress
- monitoring direction
- monitoring means
