Software For Management

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I’d like to share another thought about the role of comfort at work and in business.  I keep being struck with how often it functions in an orthogonal, if not opposing manner to working strategically and winning at the game of business. Hmm… first sentence and I already wrote that to nicely. How about saying it this way: “Be very careful about doing or supporting others doing what’s comfortable… check that it really is aligned with working, managing strategically, with the end goal in mind… otherwise it may mean you or they will not survive.”

Performance improvement starts with effective systems designed to help your people perform better and at optimum efficiency to obtain growth and progress vital to the continued growth of the organization. Employees need clearly defined goals along with constant feedback in order to do a better job.

For more about performance improvement, see http://www.performancesolutionstech.com/category/leading-performance-improvement/page/2/.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GufMa-J8cI&feature=related

Not being successful, in this case in completing projects, seems to inspire longer hours, more meetings, rationalizations… all sorts of things, maybe anything but a change in process. Changing how we communicate and collaborate with the team improves accountability and saves time…so projects can be completed on time.

Needed is a performance management tool that enables you to manage performance at the:
1. Business (including Strategic Plan and BI) level, at the
2. Project level (screenshot below), and at the
3. Individual, human resource level… all within one application.

I’d like to share another thought about the role of comfort in business.  I’m often struck with how often it functions in an orthogonal, if not opposing, manner to working strategically and winning at the game of business. Hm… first sentence and I already wrote that to nicely. How about saying it this way: “Be very careful about doing, or supporting others doing what’s comfortable… check that it really is aligned with working, managing strategically, with the end goal in mind… otherwise it may mean you or they will not survive.”

For a similar perspective, check out Alan Webber’s book, Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business without Losing Your Self.  It seems that when we lose the sense of being in touch with survival needs, we get feeling insulated, we rationalize not needing to adapt, not needing to respond, not needing to take the extra steps.

This last week I was peering at a man’s face, as his body lay crumpled on the street, his eye fixed wide open, someone feeling for his pulse, someone else calling 911.  He had walked across a busy highway at night, instead of walking the extra 50 feet down to the light ahead of us.  He didn’t survive, but he did what was comfortable… until it suddenly wasn’t.

I worked with customers from two different governments this week.  Both are slow to get even basic strategy tracking and resulting action plans implemented.  Both would be dead on the street if they had to face a car bearing down on them.

So ask yourself this: How nimble is your business, how much does doing what’s strategic, what ensures survivability, rank over comfort?

Bottom Line:

Staying in touch with the need to survive is a great antidote to over-emphasizing comfort in how we engage in life at work.  In fact, losing touch with survival needs makes us all too complacent, protective and non-adaptive in a world that often rewards the one who adapts the quickest. Be aware of the role of comfort in your work style and the work style of those around you.

I have been swamped with a large international project for the past few months, and blogging as well as a few other things, have all had to take a back seat. One thing I have been interested in writing about it seeing how people manage and translate information into a preferred work style.

In the past I’ve talked about how important follow-up is to the employee feedback and review process.  In fact, it’s possibly more important than most of the review.  Without a follow-up process, the value of the review quickly evaporates.  Today, I just wanted to share a quick thought as it applies to performance management.

If you think about it, follow-up is critical to employee reviews, but it’s equally as important to strategic planning and performance management. Follow-up, buttressed by some type of assessment or measuring process is key to anything we expend significant resources on to produce a change .  That’s true whether the follow-up is a general assessment of “What worked” and “What didn’t”, or if it is tied to specific outcome metrics (ex. Improve % of customer retension, increase % of website activity, etc.)

Stephen Gill, in an earlier blob – Describes an apt metaphor, characterizing our approach to measuring the impact of training and other “improvement” activities to playing golf in the dark – can’t accurately tell where the pin is, don’t know how close the ball you hit is to the pin and after while, you don’t care…  http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/2653383/39418883

I see that regularly in training efforts.  And on a broader scale, the analogy of investments in business and performance improvement look like playing golf without a clear assessment of the changes we make in swing or clubs.  Instead, we approach our efforts more along these lines: As long as we are still on the fairway and the game is still ongoing… we keep playing, and hoping for the best.

If there’s money in the bank, we keep playing.  Actually as the game rolls on, whether there’s more or less money in the bank, we in fact do develop theories about what “made the difference.”  The conclusions usually aren’t based on measurements, but on a perceptually based (not fact based, but much much less work to construct) opinions.

This puts us at risk to look like the story of the blind men describing the elephant by their immediate experience.  Notice how strongly we all react to others having conclusions that aren’t fact based… the conflict over the health care bill being one good example.  Assessment, and the facts that come out of it, can save you time and money, not to mention face.

Bottom Line:

Performance Management needs follow-up, which needs metrics in the worst way, otherwise it’s subject to false conclusions based on perceptions rather than facts, inactivity or just expensive, poor return on investments in “performance enhancing” activities.

Do yourself a favor, limit the performance investments to what you’re willing to invest in following-up and I bet you’ll like the results.

Remember MBAware in the 90’s? Well, maybe you don’t. How about management by objectives in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s? How about Deming and quality circles? What happened to those models for management and general productivity, and what does it have to do with project management today? The MBO model sort of came and then left, without leaving much of an overt or visible impression on most. It seemed to exit from the fore-front of management focus by the downsizing and work group turmoil and market downturn of the early 90’s. Yes, every organization has to set goals, but organizational effectiveness was going to be accomplished by macro efforts such as down-sizing, not a style of managing, a way of organizing what topics and agenda to focus upon in a given day.

With the upturn of the market and the start of the Internet gold rush, management by objectives slipped further into the past. The term “management” itself seemed to lose a sense of compelling interest. Riches were made based upon technology, upon acquisitions, upon something new, upon association with the WEB, not (for heaven’s sake) management of work effectiveness.

The premise of this article is that project management is an evolution of MBO theory, and in need of evolvement in specific directions itself… not necessarily more standardization. A second premise is that the previous models have all been eclipsed in history because their assumptions did not take into effect certain aspects in the workplace reality. The assumptions proved over time to be quite limiting, forcing the evolvement of management models with a new or improved set of assumption modifiers. The third premise is that the current model of project management is also limited by its assumptions, with recommendations for needed change and expansion to the model.

In effect, all of the work models to be discussed emphasize a certain perspective as key to achieving a goal or objective. Project management integrates certain perspectives pushed to the center of workplace thinking, and then adds its own emphasis. Each has a weakness in the assumptions that are included in their emphasis. Let’s start by reviewing some history, albeit in a summarized manner.

Goals

Humans seem to need goals to achieve extraordinary outcomes. The connection between goals and elevated performance has been in the literature as long as writing has been a part of civilization. In the last 50 years there have been more than 300 studies completed demonstrating repeated findings, or “basic truths” if you will, about humans and goals. Truths incorporated in repeated findings that:

1. People accomplish beyond their historical norm when they use goals.
2. People respond positively to stretch goals that they judge to be reasonable or attainable.
3. People stay attached to goals when leaders support a goal process by both modeling the
goal related behavior and providing feedback relative to goal progress.

What hasn’t been written as clearly is, “What happens when setting objectives or goals doesn’t work?” What happens when its effect on organizing behavior and achieving results is relatively nil? Why are goals so significant for some and relatively unused and apparently unneeded by others, both in and out of work? In this white paper we will be using goals and objectives interchangeably. We will use the term of goal to generally describe a goal or objective for the purpose of describing in broad terms the process of defining some outcome to be accomplished that is not presently within reach.

Let Managepro tell you more MBO Software products.

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White paper prepared by Rodney Brim, Ph.D.

CEO, Performance Solutions Technology, LLC

www.ManagePro.com

Copyright 2004; all rights reserved

References:

One Minute Manager, by Spencer Johnson and Ken Blanchard, 2000.

The Fifth Discipline, by Peter Senge, et.al., 1994.

Out of the Crisis, by Edward Deming, 1986.

Performance Solutions Technology, LLC

Providing software applications that help manage the information necessary for a coordinated, collaborative, strategic work force

Call toll free (877) 487-3001

Management by Objectives (MBO) (It’s in the goal)

In the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s it seemed like a good thing to manage work efforts by goals, hence the term “management by objectives.” The idea was to improve management and work productivity in general by being more defined about the intended outcomes.

MBO principals contained many precursors to the basic building blocks used by current project management tenants. The basic MBO principles included:

1. Establish a set of top level strategic goals.
2. Create a cascade of organizational goals that are supported by lower level definitive
objectives and action plans.
3. Develop an organizational role and mission statement, as well as specific objectives and action plans for each member, often in a manner that involved participative decision making.
4. Establish key results and/or performance standards for each objective.
5. Periodically measurement/assessment of the status or outcome of the goals.

The assumptive strength behind the MBO model, as commonly practiced, is the notion that if a desired outcome is defined as a goal and progress is measured towards reaching that goal, then the chances of reaching that outcome are enhanced. From a simplistic view, if you start out with a goal in mind, you are more likely to reach it or conversely, “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll probably get there.”

But MBO theory didn’t survive very actively in the work arena. Why? One weakness was its assumption that correcting the traditionally broad or vague state of goals would lead to performance improvement. Goals were accurately noted to regularly get stated and stored in a bound annual volume somewhere and only occasionally used as a measurement or reference device. An effort was made to shore up this weakness with a focusing upon the goal definition process, which became popularly known as the acronym SMART.  To put it briefly, don’t just manage by objectives; manage by “smart” goals or smart objectives.

Let Managepro give you more in formation about goal setting software.

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White paper prepared by Rodney Brim, Ph.D.

CEO, Performance Solutions Technology, LLC

www.ManagePro.com

Copyright 2004; all rights reserved

References:

One Minute Manager, by Spencer Johnson and Ken Blanchard, 2000.

The Fifth Discipline, by Peter Senge, et.al., 1994.

Out of the Crisis, by Edward Deming, 1986.

Performance Solutions Technology, LLC

Providing software applications that help manage the information necessary for a coordinated, collaborative, strategic work force

Call toll free (877) 487-3001

Smart Goals (It’s in the goal details)

The SMART goal era of the 80’s and 90’s provided some helpful criteria about what makes goals more or less effective in shaping behavior. By definition, a goal that doesn’t shape behavior is ineffective. The theory went on to suggest that SMART parameters were good predictors of influential or effective goals. As an example, goals that were not specific or measurable were less likely to shape behavior than those that were high in these characteristics. Using a play on words, you were smart to include these characteristics in your goal and objective definition.  SMART stood for the characteristics of: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Reasonable and Time-bound.

One of the almost palpable impressions of SMART goals is that they are pointed; they have an edge, often a sense of energy created by the specificity, the time limits and the measurement.  Non-SMART goals seem flat in comparison (i.e. Improve productivity); bureaucratic, like one more strategic plan that’s going nowhere. While the enhancement to goal definition was a helpful direction, it did not address fundamental weaknesses in this model.

What were the weaknesses in the MBO assumptive base that forecast its demise in the work reality?

1. It emphasized the setting of goals over the working of a plan. Do you remember when it was in vogue to “visualize” your goal daily… as if that was going to make it come to pass?

2. It underemphasized the importance of the environment or context in which the goals were set. That context included everything from the availability and quality of resources, to relative buy-in by leadership and stake-holders. As an example of the influence of management buy-in as a contextual influencer, in a 1991 comprehensive review of thirty years of research on the impact of Management by Objectives, Robert Rodgers and John Hunter concluded that companies whose CEOs demonstrated high commitment to MBO showed, on average, a 56% gain in productivity. Companies with CEOs who showed low commitment only saw a 6% gain in productivity.

3. It didn’t address the importance of successfully responding to obstacles and constraints as essential to reaching a goal. The model didn’t adequately cope with the obstacles of:
• Defects in resources, planning and methodology,
• The increasing burden of managing the information organization challenge,
• The impact of a rapidly changing environment, which could alter the landscape enough to make yesterday’s goals and action plans irrelevant to the present.

Let ManagePro talk to you about effective MBO Software that makes the job easier.

———————————————————————————–

White paper prepared by Rodney Brim, Ph.D.

CEO, Performance Solutions Technology, LLC

www.ManagePro.com

Copyright 2004; all rights reserved

References:

One Minute Manager, by Spencer Johnson and Ken Blanchard, 2000.

The Fifth Discipline, by Peter Senge, et.al., 1994.

Out of the Crisis, by Edward Deming, 1986.

Performance Solutions Technology, LLC

Providing software applications that help manage the information necessary for a coordinated, collaborative, strategic work force

Call toll free (877) 487-3001

Deming and Quality Improvement (It’s in the product/process

details)

At roughly the same time, there was an emerging model that addressed some of what the MBO model didn’t. In the face of increasing change, information demands, distance from vendors and increase in breadth of competition, Deming suggested that goals are achieved by persistent, attentive measurement of the details and quality improvement. Identify and remove the defects, the issues, the obstacles, one at a time… and ultimately the objective will be achieved. He built a model around the importance of successfully responding to goal quality issues.

Deming’s model also addressed the environment and context – in a manner. Essentially it created a team environment (Quality Circles) at the mid-management level and below, to protect and nurture the (goal) effort. This also allowed upper management to support without participating and yet avoid the de-motivating impact of not-walking the talk or modeling the desired group behavior that harpooned the MBO model. Deming’s model provided two vehicles for addressing the complexity of work.

1. A singular or galvanizing focus of pursuing goals through achieving zero defects.
2. A structure for creating and following a series of best practices or task lists to ensure the optimal achievement (highest quality) of each objective.

The weaknesses in this model, which continues to evolve, indicated as exemplified by the Six Sigma effort, include:

1. Under estimating other (market) impact and feedback sources in the environment, with the presumption that removing defects and improving quality (making it the best) would be the determining factor in reaching a business objective.

2. De-emphasizing the value of non-metric feedback loops when attempting to achieve something new, as contrasted with optimizing the existing.

As both MBO and Quality circles began to fade, the power of personal computers, spreadsheets and computerized schedules were rapidly expanded. It set the environment for an emerging demand to manage the complex in an increasingly organized manner. The achievement of increasingly complex goals nurtured the developing model of project management with an emphasis upon the specification, scheduling and deployment of resources as the chief predictor for work success and outcome delivery.

Please contact Managepro to learn more about Performance Management Software.

http://www.ManagePro.com/managepro.asp

———————————————————————————–

White paper prepared by Rodney Brim, Ph.D.

CEO, Performance Solutions Technology, LLC

www.ManagePro.com

Copyright 2004; all rights reserved

References:

One Minute Manager, by Spencer Johnson and Ken Blanchard, 2000.

The Fifth Discipline, by Peter Senge, et.al., 1994.

Out of the Crisis, by Edward Deming, 1986.

Performance Solutions Technology, LLC

Providing software applications that help manage the information necessary for a coordinated, collaborative, strategic work force

Call toll free (877) 487-3001