Any carpenter worth their weight understands the importance of precise measurements. As the saying goes, measure twice, cut once. Measurements in the business world are just as important in managing your portfolio of work, as Rick Carmona discusses.

Before you can activate your plan, you have to know exactly where you are to establish and measure your baseline. For example, if you want to be the best cloud storage company in the world, where do you stand today against your competition? You need to know where you are before you can build the plan to support your vision, whether it’s from a revenue, client satisfaction, inventory or market penetration standpoint.

If you don’t know this, how will you know when you have actually accomplished your vision statement? Once you know where you are, measurement is imperative to monitor results and show how successful you really were. That can be anything from increased sales, client satisfaction or reducing time to market.

There needs to be a quantifiable metric in there so you can see real data that validates business value. Then you need to make sure that you have the right tools and consistent processes to measure what you have planned. For example, if at year one your goal is reduced time to market, if you have the same goal in year two, make sure that the way you’re measuring is the same so you are measuring apples to apples.

Measurement tells you if you are reaching your goals. What are you measuring?