The effectiveness of a performance monitoring program can be measured in many ways, but an effective program must offer benefits that outweigh the effort and cost of implementing and running the program. While this may seem quite obvious it is very easy to get bogged down or inadvertently wander off the path to effective monitoring only to find your program consuming vast resources yet returning very little.
Evidence of this can be found in many clubs and sporting organisations where systems have been developed and dropped many times over – or – where practitioners are spending hours a day working through spreadsheets when they could be working with athletes or spending time with their families.
Many monitoring efforts are initiated by practitioners who work directly with athletes and they typically use Excel spreadsheets. These work well at first when the goal is mainly to track a few performance measures while still maintaining close contact with each athlete.
Inevitably these spreadsheets grow in scope and complexity with the addition or reports, pivot tables and macros as they try to track more and more variables. As the complexity grows so to the the time spent inputting and data and maintaining them. Many of these efforts either get to a critical level where they can grow no more due to time constraints and limitations in the spreadsheet model – or they collapse when the staff member who developed the system leaves the organisation. And so the cycle continues…
Some organisations have the resources to develop in house monitoring applications. This has many attractions as the development can be entirely tailored to suit the organisation. In practice however few of these systems are successful as the many design choices required tend to be corrupted by competing interests within the organisation. They also miss out on the benefit of experience gained by third parties in developing monitoring solutions for a range of sports and organisations.
In both these cases systems can quickly become too complex and difficult to use on a daily basis. When this happens athlete and staff compliance starts to drop, with the follow on effect of a loss of quality in the data collected. When the quality drops the value in persevering falls and in a surprisingly short time, the system spirals into failure.
To be effective in the long term, monitoring systems need to be easy to use and offer instant value to the user. If these conditions are met then high athlete and staff compliance will be assured. or for those with a more technical slant, the system needs to establish an ease – value – compliance positive feedback loop.
