One of the coolest digital inventions for the primary education system has been student/parent portals/apps. Whether you are a nosey parent OR trying to teach your child responsibility for their actions, grade portals are a great way to monitor and manage their performance.
For example, my son was struggling in a history of film course. It wasn’t that he was disinterested or failed to turn in assignments, but his overall grade in the class was abysmal. This is where the performance portal was able to help. He dug into the distribution of his grades for that class and all his assignments and major test grades where fine. But 25 percent of his grade was attributed to weekly reading quizzes, that he habitually failed.
The reason behind the quiz failures. The focus of the quizzes was different than the rest of the class assignments (and most reading quizzes he was used to). In other words, the requirements for the stakeholder/end-user varied from the normal process. Instead of structuring the quiz to capture whether the students understood the core concepts of the reading assignments, this professor wanted students to show they had read deeply and tested them on minutiae around dates and statistics from the assignments. Which meant, he could no longer read the articles once and expect to breeze through the quizzes. He had to read carefully, if not more than once, and develop detail cards for each article or chapter to study prior to the quiz. Again, in other words, he had to change his process to meet the new demands of his stakeholder.
The access to information through the portal and measures of performance (e.g., grades) helped him pinpoint what aspect of the process performance was suffering and lead him into a deep dive to understand why and consequently how he could improve.
Which all leads us to one of the most difficult of the Seven Tenets of Process Management: process performance. Process performance encompasses the measurement, monitoring, and controlling of processes. This tenet asks:
- How well do you know your processes?
- And how effectively can you identify which changes need to be made?
State of Process Performance
Organizations are good at establishing, standardizing, and documenting their processes but when we get to objectively managing them and tying them to Strategic Alignment year over year, teams start to flounder.
Historically process teams have struggled with:
- Identifying the “right” mix of leading and lagging measures.
- Using consistent measures across the organization.
- Ensuring performance measures are relevant to what they are trying to measure.
- Tying them back to the goals of the organization
Our research on process programs indicates that the state of performance management is a mixed bag.
- Measures are Tacked On—most organizations assign measures to their processes. However, they are often ad hoc and loosely based on what’s either what’s always been measured or what’s easy to measure. Rather than understanding what measures match the purpose of the process or will drive the needle for improving the maturity of the process.
- Control is Reactive—about two-thirds of organizations actively identify process control points—specific points within the process that an organization uses to monitor performance, identify improvement opportunities, and execute contingency plans when things are not performing satisfactorily—for their processes. However, most process monitoring is ad hoc or reactive based on incidents. They miss out on the opportunity to use control points as part of their process risk mitigation approach and include actions that address risk, which are triggered when processes move outside of the acceptable variation of the measures.
- Benchmarking Creates Context—just over half of process teams conduct either internal or external benchmarking for their process work. Which means that teams are setting context for the performance of their processes either between business units or against their peers or using it to set feasible performance goals. However, benchmarking activities tend to be sporadic and aligned to a specific improvement project rather than baked into their ongoing monitoring practices. Which means that teams will have more difficult time on the front end of the improvement cycle—objectively assessing process performance, tracking improvements toward a set quantitative goal, or knowing how their performance measures up against competitors.
Organizations have made strides in improving how they manage process performance. They are actively measuring process performance, establish control points, and use benchmarking for context and goal setting. However, they still struggle with challenges around the fit of their measures and pinpointing control points that help them manage their processes in more than name. This requires process teams to critically look at the purpose or value of each process, understand how it aligns with strategic goals, and then use that information to drive measure and control point selection.
To learn more about Process Performance, the following are great recommended reads:
- The Building Blocks of Process Management Maturity: Process Performance
- Picking Process Measures and Benchmarking: How to Apply the PCF
- Fundamentals of Measures
Additionally, APQC has specific training on the Seven Tenets that you might find interesting. The two courses that really hit on these tenets are:
For more process and performance management research and insights, follow Holly on Twitter at @hlykehogland or connect with Holly or Jonathan on LinkedIn.