Is there a way to actually plan—instead of hope—for better performance?
Performance Improvement Planning provides such a platform. It enables an organization to develop a focused agenda for improved performance levels. A good performance plan provides the Executive Team with three key components to improved performance: Focus, Priority and Alignment.
Focus is afforded in that the plan identifies and defines which processes are critical to achieving the organization’s business goals. Priority results in knowing which processes are critical to the achievement of those goals as well as which processes are in most urgent need of attention. Alignment ensures that the major initiatives defined in the plan support the organization’s business goals and that the members of the team agree on the priorities.
Focus: Assess & Define
To develop the Focus in a Performance Improvement Plan, an organization needs to examine its current business environment. This begins with developing an understanding of an organization’s external world, or SuperSystem.
To perform such an environmental scan, an organization’s leadership team must ask itself: What goals am I pursuing with respect to the markets I serve? What has changed most about my markets within the past 18 months? What threats and opportunities do I see in my markets? What strengths and weaknesses characterize my organization’s ability to respond to its markets’ needs? These same questions should be asked of the organization’s competition, resource providers and its overall environment.
When the environmental assessment is complete, the organization must move to define its Strategic Goals. These goals represent the critical success factors which the organization must achieve in order to deliver its three to five year strategy.
Priority: Identify & Evaluate
Once the organization has assessed its environment, it must next determine how it best responds to that environment. Clearly, this response is achieved via the organization’s collective set of workflows, or processes. Hence, it becomes necessary at this point to determine the Process Inventory for the organization.
As the Process Inventory and key process relationships are defined, the next step is to evaluate the processes. Each process is rated against two critical factors: 1) importance of the process to the organization’s Strategic Goals, and 2) relative health of the process. These ratings are performed by the Senior Leadership Team and are typically done on a simple Likert scale. When the ratings are complete, the results for each process are plotted on a four-quadrant grid which helps the organization clearly focus on which processes require immediate attention—versus those processes in which no work should be currently invested.
Alignment: Select & Manage
Now that the organization has a focused set of process improvement priorities, all with critical impact on the Strategic Objectives, the Leadership Team must now decide the appropriate process interventions to assign to the priority processes. While there are many recognized types of process improvements in the marketplace today, these can typically be grouped into four distinct categories: 1) Full Redesign, 2) Quick Redesign, 3) Problem Solving, and 4) Measure & Manage.
The full process redesign is the one with which most BPM professionals are familiar. It is the classic “As-Is”, “To-Be” process improvement. This approach is best reserved for an organization’s processes in most urgent need of attention and with the most impact on its Strategic Goals. However, for those processes whose performance requires appreciable but not substantial improvement, the Quick Redesign approach (also known as “streamlining”) can provide more than adequate benefits with less effort.
Processes whose performance is good but not quite good enough usually benefit the most from the Problem Solving intervention. This approach (also known as “root cause analysis”) will enable an organization to gather the low-hanging fruit of improvement for a given process and begin to deliver improved levels of performance the quickest.
For those processes whose design is very solid but whose performance is “hit and miss”, the Measure & Manage method is preferred. It will allow an organization to build sustainability into the performance of a given process through the use of a bona fide set of process metrics, or KPIs.
First Plan, Then Act
The Shewhart Cycle, better known as the PDCA Wheel, reminds us that an organization must first plan for improved performance, then execute to achieve the planned level of performance. While this simple concept possesses solid logic, most organizations fail to plan for improved performance. Instead, when they see or hear of an opportunity to get better, they often chase it—without regard to whether that is the best process in which to currently invest their scarce resources of time, people and money.
Do yourself and your organization a favor: begin today to follow the steps outlined herein and, along with sustained management support and commitment, measurable results will follow.
