Assessing Business Performance

3 Key excerpts on "Assessing Business Performance"

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  eBook - ePub

  Assessing Organizational Performance in Higher Education

  • Barbara A. Miller(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Jossey-Bass

    (Publisher)

  One of the greatest challenges for assessors engaged in measuring performance at the organization, program, and process levels is to understand the nature and complexity of organizational performance. Organizational performance is defined and measured in multiple dimensions, each of which is linked to specific system elements. This is why assessment of organizational performance always begins with an analysis of the system’s external and internal elements as described in Chapters Two and Three. Wise assessors generally do not measure all dimensions of organizational performance all the time. They are selective, choosing the right performance areas based on specific needs and expectations of different assessment user groups, critical success factors, strategic goals, past performance issues, emerging political and social issues, and other relevant considerations. Areas of Organizational Performance Organizational performance can be defined operationally in many ways. In 1989, Scott Sink and Thomas Tuttle operationally defined seven areas of organizational performance. I formed them into a new combination more suited for assessment in higher education. By now you will recognize these seven areas of organizational performance as the following: 1. Effectiveness: a measure of the extent to which the unit achieves its intended outcomes 2. Productivity: a ratio of outputs created to inputs consumed 3. Quality: a complex area of performance measured in six dimensions: Quality of upstream systems (Q 1) Quality of inputs (Q 2) Quality of key work processes (Q 3) Quality of outputs (Q 4) Quality of leadership systems (Q 5) Quality of worklife (Q 6) 4. Customer and stakeholder satisfaction: a measure of the level of satisfaction of internal and external customers and stakeholders 5. Efficiency: a measure of resource utilization and the costs and benefits of quality management 6. Innovation: a measure of creative changes put into place to improve organizational performance 7

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  Enterprise Planning and Development

  • David Butler(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Reviewing the Performance of the Business

  DOI: 10.4324/9780080462851-14

  The purpose of this chapter is to describe the processes which can be used to analyse the past and current performance of a business – the where-are-we-now scenario. In effect, this is the first stage of the quantum leap from operational to strategic thinking. The process will enable us to systematically examine and critically review the key aspects of business performance, and to identify areas where actions are needed to improve or strengthen current systems and procedures. This goes beyond an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the business, and the opportunities and threats it faces – that was okay for the start-up stages of the business but now we need to examine the needs of the business in more detail. It is in effect an audit of each facet of the business and the way it operates. It attempts to answer the first of the three key questions asked by the strategic planning process – where are we now, where do we want to go, and how do we get there? The chapter also relates to Small Firms Enterprise Development Initiative (SFEDI) National Occupational Standards for Business Development, and the self-assessment questionnaire shown in Appendix is based on the principles of the Business Health Check process in the SFEDI Standards.

  Lasher (1999 , p. 8) makes the distinction between corporate strategy as the process which takes place in large organisations to optimise the performance of their diverse activities, and competitive strategy which takes place in smaller companies, or larger ones in single lines of business activity. There are a number of well-established strategic analysis models that can be used for performance review, although they are primarily designed for use in that big-company corporate strategy context. For example, the McKinsey 7S analysis (Waterman & Peters, 1982

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  Strategic Performance Management

  • Bernard Marr, Dina Gray(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Figure 5.5 ).

  Figure 5.4 Towards assessment and indicators

  Figure 5.5 Assessment and indicators for strategic elements

  Assessing performance and selecting indicators

  Dee Hook, founder of the Visa network, said that:

  in years ahead, we must get beyond numbers and the language of mathematics to understand, evaluate and account for such intangibles as learning, intellectual capital, community, beliefs and principles, or the stories we tell of our tribe’s values and prosperity will be increasingly false.30

  Many books on Performance Measurement often assume that all relevant performance data is either already available or can be easily collected. Unfortunately, this is mostly not the case. Even though we might have a lot of performance data in our organizations, it is often not the relevant and meaningful information we need. Instead of relying on data that is available in our existing IT systems, we should first identify what we would really like to assess, and then compare it with what we already have in place. This allows us to see how close we can get with our existing indicators to what it is that we want to assess.

  In many cases, the information we want is not at all, or only insufficiently, available. This means we have to collect more data. One way to get a good idea about how to assess performance in a particular area is to ask the people who are most closely involved in that area. Far too often we impose measures on people. Assessing performance for strategic learning means that people have to believe in the indicators and use them to inform their decision-making. Therefore, involving people (both internal and external) is critically important.

  Not only should we involve people in the selection of possible indicators, but also in the assessment of performance and the collection of data. Many studies have shown that perceptional assessment is as reliable, if not more reliable, than archival data.31

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