Last week I asked Jonathan Becker of Manage by Walking Around blog and Gary Cokins of Closing the Intelligence Gap blog to argue the definition of Performance Management and what it might look like…and in all fairness, I need to also share mine:
Performance Management is composed of three distinct disciplines, Strategy Management, Operational Performance Management, and Financial Performance Management. It is a systematic and standardized management and communication process to proactively enhance performance gaps.
- Strategy Management – to set direction, foster alignment, and communicate priorities
- Operational Performance Management – where we execute our goals and objectives by creating customer value along with our core processes. This is also the most widely defined as each industry handles this somewhat differently, but how we manage it should be integrated with a common process.
- Financial Performance Management – to provide insight into what resources we have and how best to use through monitoring and reporting upon the budget.
In addition to this we need to use within the same system our enabling support structure. This includes managing technology, culture, people, etc. Each element needs to be improved upon based upon strategic need, thus helping to eliminate personal politics and squeaky wheels. Below is my Performance Management framework.
Gary makes a great point that most people create a framework that is intentionally incomplete to enhance their offerings (and I completely agree). I built the above framework with the goal of a complete framework. It is not perfect, but I feel provides a strong starting point to assess our process improvement gaps.
In the end, management is just a process, albeit a very important one. It needs to be enhanced and improved to leverage the most of the management talent.
PureStone Partners LLC 