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Business Performance Assessment Program – The Horizontal Cut Approach
An organization’s limited personnel resources necessitates that its business performance assessments be performed in the most efficient manner possible. While at times there may be the need for an in-depth end-to-end process review, at other times it will be appropriate to examine performance of a specific task or activities by numerous performers from across the organization. On these occasions, the horizontal cut assessment approach is most appropriate.
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All company functions are constrained by limited resources. As such, it is impossible for an organization to self assess every activity it performs. Therefore, business performance assessments need to be executed in a way that identifies the significant improvement opportunities at the lowest possible cost. One such approach is to do a thorough end-to-end review of a few occurrences of high value process.
Business performance assessments can be a powerful tool for determining the unknown drivers of performance; their effectiveness derived from the diverse knowledge and experience of the multidiscipline team and the vast amounts of information from causal evaluations, work performance observations, executive, manager, employee, and customer interviews, financial reports, independent analyst reports, performance measures, and condition reports leveraged to perform these assessments. So rich and robust are these assessments that their credibility often goes unchallenged, yet a single flaw in the business performance assessment’s initial execution can make this power tool for continuous improvement an instrument of disaster.
“The road to ruin is paved with good intentions.”
Business performance assessments aggregate huge amounts of data in order to provide a very few high value insights. (See Figure 1: Data Refinement and Consolidation Model below) As an assessment progresses, evaluators often feel increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of data they must sift through, organize, and analyze. Time seems to slip away and pressure to find the key insights mounts; making the objective appear to be that of finding a needle in a haystack with only a moment’s notice. To be successful requires thoughtful, deliberate preparation.
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