As I work through my own professional goals plan for the year, I am reminded of an early lesson in management consulting. This technique has do more with firms that are implementation-oriented as opposed to strategy-based, and it is related to getting a client organization to move. I don’t know if there is a name for the technique, but for the purposes here, I’ll call it "progress to goal management".
The essence of the technique begins with the consultant working with the client organization to establish one or more measureable goals and then reporting on actual performance regularly with a gap diagnostic. Let’s say a goal is to create $5.5 million in annual revenue for a new start-up initiative (say $500K in Q1, $1M in Q2, $2M in Q3, and $2M in Q4). The consultant then works with the client to put a regular measurement system in place, say monthly. Suppose that by the end of Q1 that the client has only achieved 15% of the goal. The consultant should be working with the manager owning the revenue to report not only the numeric gap in performance but also a diagnostic of why things are off track (from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives).
Although the technique may seem obvious, in implementation consulting, one is often trying to diagnose problems or set up operations for things that happen below a corporate-level or business unit-level. The devil may be in the details and low-levels of the company so-to-speak. Thus, things like board-level measurements and control may neither be enforced nor visible. Other situations where measurements may not be readily available include setting up new business structures (e.g., new business line) or bypassing old business structures (e.g., where old methods too cumbersome or bureaucratic).
Other than trying to help the client (which is the primary goal, of course), the flip side of this is that the consultant is pulling a "CYA" in some sense. One can’t start a project and then six months later show up and simply report to executive management that the goal wasn’t met by the business unit or functional area management. Progress to goal (and gap) reporting is needed every step of the way along with mid-course control and corrections. In this way, the consultant separates the aspects of proper management control from management’s ability to execute.