Purpose of monitoring and evaluating
Why should you monitor progress during your development plan?
- It allows you to see if your approaches are working:
- If your approaches are working, you can stick with them
- If your approaches aren't working, you can adapt them to more suitable or interesting approaches.
- It allows you to check if you are meeting each short-term target in your sessions and if suitable progress is being made towards the long-term target:
- If you are not reaching each short-term target and progress is slow towards the long-term one, you can lower your targets and/or extend the length of your development plan.
- It allows you to express how well you think a session went in relation to how challenging it was.
- If you did not find it challenging enough, you can increase the intensity in the next session to avoid hitting a plateau.
Why should you evaluate how effective your development plan was?
Monitoring is different from evaluating. The reasons for tracking progress are different from the reasons for evaluating the success of a development plan.
You should evaluate the effectiveness of your training programme for the following reasons:
- It lets you look back and measure how much improvement have been made in both the identified factor and the whole performance:
- This can help you identify new weaknesses which you can then take back through the cycle of analysis to further develop your performance.
- By looking back, you can measure which approaches worked best for you during your development plan:
- Knowing this can lead to you using the same approaches in the future if they are suitable to your new weaknesses.