Blog · 30 April 2026 · 6 min read
A tracker earns its keep through comparability. Every improvement to the method is a threat to that, and the trade-off deserves to be made deliberately.
Trackers accumulate value slowly and lose it quickly. Every wave adds to the trend; a single undocumented method change can put a step in the series that nobody can subsequently explain or remove.
The uncomfortable implication is that improving a tracker is usually a cost, not a benefit — at least in the wave where the improvement lands.
If a change has to happen, running both methods for one wave is the only way to quantify what it did. It costs one additional wave of fieldwork on the affected questions, and it converts an unexplainable step into a documented offset.
Clients who have lived through the alternative rarely object to the cost a second time.
Every tracker should have a method document that is specific enough for a different supplier to reproduce the wave: sources, quotas, weighting scheme, code frames, cleaning rules and removal criteria. Most do not, and the knowledge sits with whoever has run it longest.
That is a continuity risk with a trivial fix, and it is the first thing we build when we take on an existing tracker.
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