Performance Management

Oh…that annual ritual! Yes, that is how it feels in most places. When senior managers discuss the need for improving the performance management system in their organisations, the antidote is often a new IT application to help manage the recording and tracking of objectives.

A few hundreds of thousands pounds later they are probably still living with the problem and frustrated with the IT application. This usually happens because they have not devoted the time and effort to create a performance management system first. The top-down approach stops with vision, mission and if lucky an agreed business plan. It is then left for people to join the dots by a bottom up approach. This creates a massive issue with traceability of progress through the year. We have even seen situations where everyone has met their objectives and yet the organisation hasn’t!

Our recommended approach is to undertake the implementation of something like the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) once the business plan is done on a 3-year rolling basis, followed by a cascade of objectives to department levels and then on to team level. This maintains a clear line of sight, is efficient, is integrated and best of all avoids being an annual ritual.