What a written tolerance looks like on paper

Every programme claims to have targets. Very few have a tolerance. A tolerance is a different document with a different job, and the difference shows up on the day a reading comes back bad.

A target and a tolerance are not the same thing

A target says what good looks like. A tolerance says what happens when the reading is not good, who does it, and by when. Marketing plans routinely carry the first and skip the second, which is why a bad month produces a meeting rather than an action.

The test is simple. Read the plan and find the sentence naming the person who acts when a specific figure falls outside a specific band. If that sentence is absent, the plan has targets and no tolerance.

The four fields

A tolerance line is short. Four fields, written before any reading exists.

• The measurement, named precisely enough that two people would compute it the same way. Not cost per lead, but cost per qualified opportunity as defined in the data model, taken monthly from the recorded outcome rather than the platform figure.
• The band, with both edges. A ceiling alone invites a programme to sit just under it. The floor matters too, because a figure far better than expected is usually a measurement fault rather than a triumph.
• The action on breach, named as a specific act. Pause the channel. Re-run the false positive hunt on the segment. Rebuild the routing. Not review, not investigate, not discuss.
• The person, by name rather than by role, because a role is nobody at eleven o'clock on a Friday.

The ones we got wrong

Two failures from our own programmes, both of them in the design rather than the execution.

The first was a tolerance with a ceiling and no floor on cost per qualified opportunity. The figure came in far below the band for two months and everybody congratulated everybody. The cause was a qualification step passing people it should have flagged, so the denominator was inflated and the cost looked excellent. A floor would have caught it in week three instead of month three.

The second was a tolerance whose breach action read investigate the drop. Nobody can be made accountable for investigating. The line was rewritten to pause the lowest performing source and re-run the segment through a false positive hunt, which is a thing a named person either did or did not do by a date.

Where the tolerance sheet lives

Inside the specification, agreed at the start, and reread at the quarterly review rather than at the moment of breach. A tolerance opened for the first time on the day a figure goes bad will be renegotiated, because everybody in the room now knows the answer and can see which edge is inconvenient.