A target is missed, and the organization moves on to the next period. No one sits down and works out exactly what it cost. It’s too uncomfortable, and there’s always something more urgent to deal with. But the cost is there, split across several kinds, and most of them never show up on one single line.
Before doing the calculation, it’s worth separating two very different things: a missed organizational target and a worse outcome for an individual participant. A missed target at group level can’t automatically be translated into a specific participant getting a worse service. The link might exist, but it needs to be shown, not assumed.
Three cost categories, with different degrees of measurability:
- Direct extra cost (measurable). If fewer participants than planned move on to work, the placement is often extended, or a new placement needs to start. This can be calculated in extra case-handling time and administration using your own data.
- Capacity loss (partly measurable). Time spent handling a missed target afterward, extra meetings and follow-up, is time that could otherwise have gone to new cases. You can estimate roughly how much time this involves, even if it’s rarely exact.
- Risk and trust (hard to measure, requires judgment). Repeated missed targets without a clear explanation can affect the relationship with a commissioner, for example through tighter reporting requirements. How big that risk is can rarely be given a reliable number, but it’s worth assessing and describing in words.
It’s tempting to explain a missed target with external factors like the economy or the composition of the participant group. Such explanations can well be true. The important question is whether they recur often enough to risk becoming a way to avoid examining your own way of working, rather than whether they’re true in the moment.
A typical case is an organization that has missed its target for share in work after twelve months two years running, and both times landed on an explanation involving external factors. Without evidence of what actually happened in the work, there’s no way to tell whether the explanation is linked to the outcome or just convenient. Wording like “caused” should be avoided here; “is linked to” or “gives grounds to assess” is more accurate as long as only a correlation, not a cause, has been shown.
A simple four-step exercise with your own numbers:
- Choose one concrete missed target or a recurring deviation from the most recent period.
- Calculate the direct extra cost: extra time × internal hourly cost, plus any verifiable extra costs.
- Estimate the capacity loss: what else that time could have been used for.
- Assess risk and trust in words: what effect it could reasonably have on the relationship with the commissioner, without putting a made-up figure on it.
Building a routine where the cost is worked out period after period, rather than a one-off analysis before an important meeting, is what makes the calculation useful over time. It requires someone to be given the job of holding onto it, but the exercise above is quick to do the first time.
Putting a clear, broken-down price tag on a missed target changes the internal conversation. Instead of a missed target just feeling disappointing, it becomes a concrete basis for prioritizing differently next period.
Don’t start with a dramatic total. Start with one deviation or one missed target you can follow and calculate with your own data. For the individual participant, the cost of a missed target is rarely abstract: it can mean more time outside working life. That cost rarely shows up in any report, but it’s worth keeping in mind alongside the calculation.