In our experience there can be four areas where a black hole can appear in any business:

• the investment chasm (resources - time as well as money)
• the staffing chasm (poor deployment can be worse than reductions)
• the governance chasm (relevant business priorities and standardisation)
• the action chasm (set the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and measure the results)

Four of the most common causes of the black hole:

Lack of top-level executive sponsorship

Does your boss (or you, if you are one) recognize how valuable it is to the business to identify the goals, set the KPIs and take action? How many companies have a measurement strategy to get them to their goals? It is always worth taking time out to think this through and if you are not the boss, there is an opportunity to identify the priorities and the suggested resolutions to any identified blockages along the way.

Business alignment

All businesses have a set of values and should have a plan of what needs to be achieved to get to their goals. But how many fail to recognize that they do a lot of things on a day to day basis which are not connected to the plan? By always asking the question 'who benefits from this?' the ultimate answer should always be 'the business'.

Training

By finding the priorities of the business it becomes an easy matter to discover whether everyone has the skills to achieve the goals. If not, the boss needs to recognize the goal(s) won't be achieved unless they find the competent resources to deliver the plan (which can be inside or outside the organisation).

Quick wins

There are always quick wins to give everyone hope and encouragement along the way to achieving a goal. Say, for example, it became important for a PR Agency to prove the effectiveness of its campaign through being able to provide ROI. There are simple evaluation packages available which can work it out for you - ongoing daily, at the end of a month or at the end of a campaign. It's irrefutable evidence - it's not expensive - training can be provided for staff to be able to produce it (or it can be produced for you) - and by using an on-line portal, it is a way of using modern technology to streamline data collection and reporting, saving labour costs or using staff for less 'mechanical' tasks.