Tagged: Business process mapping

Measure team performance

There are many ways to assess the performance of a team and the conditions under which the team performs. Let’s look at an approach developed by McKinsey and refined by the World Management Survey.

The World Management Survey’s approach is to get a variety of employees taking about  18 topics, to reveal the conditions under which work is performed. Questions are used as conversation starters to cover topics such as how change is introduced, if and how people are held accountable, what people are held accountable for, performance measurement and tracking, etc.

Here are some of the questions (the complete list may be found here). The questions have been used across manufacturing, retail, healthcare and education which means the questions are robust and the discussions generated will help you make better decisions about enhancing team and supervisor performance.

Example questions

The conversations about process improvement and documentation include:

  1. How do problems typically get exposed and fixed?
  2. Talk me through the process for a recent problem that you faced?
  3. Who typically gets involved in changing or improving?
  4. How do/can different staff groups get involved in this process? Take me through a recent example?
  5. How can the staff suggest process improvements?

For the topic of clarity and compatibility of goals the conversation starters include:

  1. If I asked someone on your staff directly about individual targets, what would they tell me?
  2. How do people know how their own performance compares to other people’s performance? Is this published or posted in any way?
  3. Could every person here could tell me what they are responsible for and how that will be assessed? What would they say? What would you say?

Contrast the scenarios where most people interviewed about the above topic in an organisation indicated they had no clear idea of how performance is measured, with another organisation where performance is continuously tracked and communicated to all staff using a range of visual management tools?

It’s hard work to identify accurately the development needs of a supervisor independent of the operational maturity of the organisation.

Do you know how things get done?

How to support your organisation’s direction

Supporting your organisation – aligning activities, committing, collaborating, deciding, and putting your organisation ahead of your team – sometimes these are challenging for leaders and managers.

These actions go to our understanding of how things get done at work and of our opportunities to challenge and question how things are done, and the direction of our organisation. How might you support your organisation’s direction? Let’s start by finding out how things are done.

How do things get done?

Rules – corporate systems, processes, procedures, protocols and policies help hold organisations together. With these, people understand what to do in the variety of situations in which they find themselves. Without them, or where they are used inconsistently, practices may vary considerably from one business unit to another, from one team member to another. Variance is cost. Strong organisational cultures attract and retain people who commit to the organisation’s direction and purpose, and who enjoy getting things done the way they are expected to get things done.

It is difficult to support an organisation’s direction if you do not understand how things are done. It is just as difficult to question and challenge how things are done if you do not understand the processes, the repeatable patterns of tasks accomplished to serve customers. If you do not know the rules you do not know what to do and you also do not know what to question.

Let’s understand the rules. One way to get to grips with the rules – how things are done – is to focus on a process that cuts across a couple of different business units. Use your own example or take one of these two – recruiting a new staff member and fulfilling an order. Often, more than one business unit is involved in completing these two activities so examining how these processes work may introduce you to the rules and how they apply across functions.

Use Post-It Notes to show or map all of the tasks and decisions involved in recruiting a new staff member, or fulfilling an order. Post-It Notes make it easy to move steps and tasks around as you find out how things are really done.

List the steps as they are currently accomplished.

Write each step and each decision on a different Post-It Notes; it helps to use different colours for the different functions.

Now that you’ve mapped the process, here are some questions to help focus attention on what the process map shows:

  1. How many different business units are involved in this process?
  2. Who owns the process?
  3. If everyone really did all these things the right way at the right time – what would be the outcome?
  4. What opportunities can you see in this map?
  5. What do we know so far/still need to learn about how this process works?