The need to verify estimated improvement produced by the changes should be a part of the change management process. This can be accomplished with a monitoring plan for the occasional auditing of procedures and practices to minimize procedural drifts or normalization of undocumented deviations, and evaluation of future suggestions for changes. Investigation Catalyst Matrixes support such monitoring by providing a baseline for comparing expected actions with observed behaviors (who is doing what when and where) after the changes are made. The Matrixes define the behaviors to observe, and pinpoint where in the operation to make such observations, enabling the effective, efficient monitoring of the ongoing effectiveness of the changes over time. The Overlap View provides further insights into overlapping actions that may require especially close monitoring.

The ongoing monitoring plan can be as simple as providing directions to supervisors for changed actions to watch during day by day operations, in the form of a check list, to setting up periodic audits requiring documentation of observed conformance with intended operation and any difficulties with conformance, for example, depending on the nature, extent and significance of the change(s.)

Note that if a system of periodic audits is the selected monitoring plan, the change audit may be only a part of a broader scale operations audit. Hopefully such planned audits would be part of an ongoing effort to ensure continuing performance integrity and improvement.

The actual monitoring task is to observe what is happening, note any differences between intended actions on the Matrix and what is observed, and then act on those differences. Any differences constitute another change, which should be analyzed, either informally using the reasoning process for analyzing changes described previously, or formally when it is considered possible that the change might have substantial impact on the operation - either favorable or unfavorable.

Documentation of observed monitoring results is facilitated by having the Matrix of the operation being observed available on a laptop, where the description of the operation is readily accessible, and where new information resulting from the observations. Alternatively, printouts of the operation work equally well for making field observations, but manual notation of differences and modification of the Matrixes is less efficient.

Keeping an "as built" description of a system operation should be a continuing objective of any system description. Anytime changes are made to system operations, the baseline Matrix should be updated. Matrixes offer a convenient and efficient way to capture and display changes.