The Last Planner System of Production Control includes the practice of tracking a team’s performance of task execution against tasks promised. Why? It’s true that what gets measured gets attention, and so the act of keeping what appears to be a scorecard does focus attention on the actions teams must take to make reliable promises in planning meetings, and then following through on those promises.
The deeper reason for tracking promises is that plan performance feedback provides information we can use for learning; such as how to plan better, how to perform more closely to expectations, and how to develop countermeasures to prevent the reoccurrence of problems.
A mistaken reason for tracking plan performance is to identify weak links among team members. Project work is so interdependent that a team member’s apparent failure is related to system variability and other disruptions to flow beyond that member’s control. Make sure to use plan performance information to improve as a team, rather than a score to assign blame for system failures.