"Why Do I Keep Showing Up As Behind?"

This is so fundamental, but it comes up often! The whole purpose of Cascade is to be able to simply consolidate and track your strategic plan and making sure the status of it is accurate is essential. When you go from “On Track” to “Behind” it should be clear why that is.

Our Answer: “Check your Tracking tab setup!”

Any Goal’s status in Cascade always comes from the Tracking tab setup. You can see it in two places:

1. The Goal Hub. Click right in the middle of your “% Complete” to bring up the Tracking curve. Hover over it to find your expected vs. actual progress across the curve.
   
2. The Goal Designer. Use the pencil button and then go right to the Tracking tab in the window that comes up. This is where you can adjust the curve using Milestones!

At this point, we’ve already told Cascade that we are going to complete this Goal by the deadline, so this tab is meant to help show what progress to expect between now and then. Without Milestones, Cascade is expecting linear progress every day. We recommend using Milestones in the following situations:

• The Goal is tracking a specific metric with old data to track against (i.e. monthly revenue from last year). Set a milestone for each of those old data points.
• You know extra context that will let you subjectively set expectations across the timeline. Set milestones based on your judgement (remember – the setup will never be perfect!).

Steps vs. Linear

If you know for a fact that the Goal will only be updated on a regular basis, such as monthly or quarterly, we recommend using Step Milestones rather than Linear. This way, Cascade will know to not expect progress in between those monthly touch points. This is a must for Enterprise-wide reporting accuracy!