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Business Performance Assessment Program Best Practice 8 – Documented Business Performance Assessment Process
Effective performance improvement programs promote alignment of business operations with the organization’s vision, mission, values, and goals. Such programs consistently identify opportunities to improve high value-adding operations and to eliminate low value-adding activities. These programs themselves are highly efficient and capable of producing repeatable results. Documenting the business performance assessment process provides the framework necessary to achieve this level of focused execution consistency.
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About the Author
Nathan Ives is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.
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.
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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