Performance Perspectives

Author Archives: Bob Champagne

Top 10 Directional Miscues In Implementing an EPM System…

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A COLLABORATIVE WORK-IN-PROCESS…

REQUESTED INPUT FROM ALL READERS

Today, I am starting work on an article on the subject of “why Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) initiatives fail. But rather than waxing eloquent on my personal past experiences, which I have droned on about over the last 5 years on this blog, I’ve decided to take a somewhat different direction. This time, I am going to build this around my readers direct experiences, a purely “from the front” line perspective, if you will.

I think this will be interesting from a few different angles:

  • First, by its very nature, any discussion of EPM will bring together what have emerged as disparate disciplines over the years: HR, IT, Strategic Planning, Corporate Performance, Budgeting, et al. I discussed the challenges of this at length a few days back in my post on “integrating and unifying performance management” . Bringing these perspectives together in one common dialogue will be refreshing, I think.
  • Second, it will not simply focus on reasons for failure, but specifically those “choice points” where taking a different path would have yielded a different result or avoided a key mistake- Implementation related “Moments of Truth” if you will.
  • Finally the result will be your’s, not that of one consulting trying to promote their own solutions (at least not directly), but rather a collection of perspectives from users, clients, and thought leaders, wherever they reside in the EPM value chain.

I’ll try not to “lead” or steer this too much, except to provide you a few broad categories to comment on. But I welcome you to add any other category or insight you feel would be useful. Some example areas to prime the pump so to speak, include:

  • Aligning managers and executives
  • defining the measurement architecture
  • building out the measurement framework
  • installing your EPM technology
  • involvement of HR and appraisal systems
  • cultural issues and choice points
  • integration with reward structures
  • etc..

In submitting your input, I’d like you to be brief, but as specific as possible. i.e. what was the choice involved? What were the paths you were considering? why you chose the one you did? what failure occurred as a result of your decision? what you believe the alternative path would have produced?

I’d like to see feedback from different perspectives: Executives to middle managers, Vendors to clients, “thought leaders” to employees at the “work face”- et al. The more perspectives we get the better.

You can post your comments below, or if you feel more comfortable sharing this in private, just DM me at @bobchampagne on twitter, and I will provide you with a way to get in touch with me to discuss further. I will synthesize over the coming days and weeks, but feel free to check back and follow the discussion here, on twitter, or wherever the conversation takes us. At the conclusion of the process, or perhaps during, we may elect to do a twitter style roundtable/ conference call if that is useful.

Thanks in advance for your input and participation. They say maximum learning is produced by studying, in depth, both your successes and failures. By exploring the pro’s and cons of various “directional” choices, my hope is that we can create another “step change” in how EPM solutions are designed and delivered.

-b

Author: Bob Champagne is Managing Partner of onVector Consulting Group, a privately held international management consulting organization specializing in the design and deployment of Performance Management tools, systems, and solutions. Bob has over 25 years of Performance Management experience and has consulted with hundreds of companies across numerous industries and geographies. Bob can be contacted at bob.champagne@onvectorconsulting.com

 

First things First- PROCESS before technology…

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Here is is post I wrote a few years back. I was reminded of it while on a call today on Sales Enablement and Automation. Not surprising that it always comes back to “doing the RIGHT things RIGHT”.  BTW- an update on the below article- 3 years later, the process at EWR is STILL THE SAME!!!!                                          ———————————

Here’s a brief story I encountered while leaving Newark International Airport following a recent business trip. Hard to believe, but true.

After a long flight home from the West Coast, I took a short train ride to the long term parking facility, located my car (which is becoming more difficult with age it seems), and proceeded to the parking exit. Note that it’s been a while since I’ve used the long term parking facility, as I normally use a car or taxi service, so I was largely unfamiliar with their new “high tech” customer solutions.

As I pulled up to the pay station (expecting the attendant to inform me of my charge), she immediately looked at me with the gaze of a very frustrated woman who’s obviously done this before. In a short tone, she barked out an instruction suggesting that I had passed an automated ticket booth, from which I should have inserted my ticket and noted the charge. I complied with the instruction, quietly wondering why this woman was in the booth at all, given the fact that the machine and I pretty much had this thing licked. I concluded of course that she must be there to collect the money, so I proceeded to pay her. Not a good assumption as she pointed me back to the machine to insert my payment. OK, I get it, I interact with the machine for this too…no problem, thinking that this is a pretty good solution. I wait for the machine to give me my receipt, an obvious assumption given how the first two steps went. Nope…wrong again. This time she wants me to drive to her and pick up my receipt, at which point she presses a button, lifts the gate, and I’m on my merry way.

I can’t help thinking about all the time and money went into implementing this slick new solution, that probably cost an arm and a leg, had little to no impact on cost savings, destroyed customer satisfaction, and obviously put the employee in a perpetual stae of ‘grumpy’. No…what this was, is yet another example of “technology for technology’s sake”.

When I work with organizations on business impovement, one of the most important themes I try to drill home is PROCESS FIRST, then technology. You don’t implement technology on top of a broken process. Nor do you attempt to fix a broken brocess with technology only.

The right path is to measure the effectiveness of the process before you begin. Establish a baseline. Understand how the process works today (‘As Is’ State). Look for places to improve the process. Define changes. Examine the effect of each potential change on overall performance. Then, and only then, define the technology, systems, skills, and organization needed to support the new process. Develop cost benefits and business cases. Re-examine the degree to which performance will be improved over baseline. And then your almost ready for implementation.

It’s a simple principle, but one that often get overlooked. Try to pay some attention to this in your everyday life and you’ll probably see many similar examples. Then, use these as lessons learned, and start living by the mantra- “First Things First”- process first, technology later.

 

-b

Author: Bob Champagne is Managing Partner of onVector Consulting Group, a privately held international management consulting organization specializing in the design and deployment of Performance Management tools, systems, and solutions. Bob has over 25 years of Performance Management experience and has consulted with hundreds of companies across numerous industries and geographies. Bob can be contacted at bob.champagne@onvectorconsulting.com

 

D-M-A-I-C Revisited…

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As a follow up to my post yesterday, and my recent attempts to expand our thinking on what Enterprise Performance Management really is, I’ll focus a little bit on another integral part of the collective whole- the “analytic and problem solving” side of the equation.

My thinking on this was triggered largely by a twitter post I received yesterday which read “Why is Performance Management focused on measurement & control – it should release performance rather than trying to contain it”. I believe the tweet was actually zeroing in on the “contain and control” element of some of today’s more popular business improvement frameworks, viewing their thinking as somehow contradictory to actually building value …kind of suggesting an “either/ or” mindset. But the more I reflected on it, I realized that, for me, this was more of an “and/both” issue. Let me explain…

There are many problem solving frameworks out there when it c

omes to business improvement, but one of the most common approaches is built upon the Lean and Six Sigma disciplines- a collection of problem solving and analysis tools and practices which have emerged in many organizations across the globe in the past decade as the business improvement philosophy of choice.

One of the many tools applied by the Lean community when approaching a business problem is what they call D-M-A-I-C (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control). You can also find this principle within many other business improvement frameworks, but its roots reside in some of the very early thinking in the development of the Lean, Six Sigma and related improvement/ quali

ty methodologies. I’ve kind of always viewed DMAIC as an extension of the old Plan-Do-Check-Adjust model, but I’m sure some of the Lean purists would probably take issue with that, and I certainly can’t debate that. What I can tell you is that these kind of tools and mental models do work, and help greatly in demystifying and putting a problem into a bigger and more relevant context.

But in my view, it does fail to capture two critical dimensions:

  • The importance of alignment- I’ve discussed this at length in some of my previous posts (securing alignment), but suffice it to say, it is one of the main reasons that strategies fail, and that KPI’s that are viewed as critical by management, often get ignored. Simply defining the business objective or problem statement and jumping straight to the measurement aspect seems to miss the importance of the alignment that is required before the problem can be attacked head on with maximum commitment from the team.
  • The importance of Value Capture (or what I often refer to as value RELEASE)- There is some good thinking that is emerging in this area, and I encourage you to explore it. But the key implication us that if we don’t put a high degree of emphasis on capturing the value (“ringing the cash register” in some way), then all we have really engaged in is a philosophical or analytic exercise. Whenever I see pockets of an organization deploying Lean based tools, without significant involvement from the CFO and budgeting functions (which is the primary control mechanism to capture, contain, and ensure value is released), I get concerned. See my EOY review of EPM trends (bullet #3) for a discussion of this)

I am certainly not proposing another itteration of DMAIC or PDCA, as these models have served us well over the years. And since philosophies like  Lean, Six Sigma,and the older ones like TQM  are the closest we’ve gotten to the kind of holistic approaches to EPM I recommend in yesterday’s post, we cant be too quick to dismiss some of their core tenets.

But I do submit that these two missing components – alignment and value capture– are too critical to be left out of the discussion, and simply embedded into the broader methodology. Like I suggested yesterday, our thinking often gets limited because of the nature of the disciplines and practitioners involved, and in this case we may be seeing the same thing. Lean thinking is highly analytical and problem solving oriented, and hence, some of its practitioners tend to place less emphasis on other complementary disciplines needed here: the human side of aligning leadership teams and employees, and the financial realism of actually releasing value on the back end of the cycle. And when that occurs, we can be left with the coolest mathematical equations, graphs and control charts, with little hope that value will actually accrue on the back end.

I’d like to hear your thoughts.

-b

Author: Bob Champagne is Managing Partner of onVector Consulting Group, a privately held international management consulting organization specializing in the design and deployment of Performance Management tools, systems, and solutions. Bob has over 25 years of Performance Management experience and has consulted with hundreds of companies across numerous industries and geographies. Bob can be contacted at bob.champagne@onvectorconsulting.com

The Pursuit of a More INTEGRATED and UNIFYING Performance Management Process

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Try and google any profession or discipline in business, and you’ll no doubt get millions of search results, ranging from the most basic definitions and history of the profession (a la wiki pages), to a litany of vendors and experts doing everything from advertising their offers to providing tips and “how to ” advice.

But while the volume of search results might be a bit more frustrating than you might like, the general topic discussed remains relatively consistent. Google “law”, and you get lawyers and law related topics. Google “medicine” and you get medical advice and thinking. Google “golf” and you get golf tips, instruction, and scores. Sure, you get content reflecting different variants of the profession, and even varying depth of discussion, but not different professions altogether.

Now try and google “perform

ance management” and watch what you get. Chances are, you might feel like you’re wading through a forest at night without a flashlight. But if you wade into it long enough, you’ll start to see four separate categories of content (and what essentially has emerged over the years as four separate professions) with their own content, messages, thought leaders, followers, and overall “ecosystem” (a bit much for what is really a single and simple, yet very important, business process).

  • You’ll see those who focus on the pure HR discipline, where performance management carries a connotation of employee appraisal systems, compensation, coaching and the myriad of other topics. Most would put in the “human capital” context.
  • You’ll also see those who focus on the metrics and measurement aspect of the business (the importance of measurement, kpi’s, performance reporting and analysis). These results often cater the needs of corporate performance or measurement functions.
  • You will also see some level of strategic dialogue, from strategy mapping to alignment of executive teams and even basic planning frameworks taught in first year b- school. All of this is generally oriented toward strategic planning functions and the executive team themselves.
  • But by far, the most prevalent hits will come from the business intelligence (BI) community, which is most often geared to the IT and sometimes the CFO crowd.

For any of us who have spent time in the PM discipline, we know that there is no “one right answer”. All of these professions create value in their own domain. And the discussions you find in each area- be it on blog sites, web sites, or social media, carry very useful content. But they still show up as very different in terms of their focus, content, audience, and even the agenda they are pushing.

Ok, but is this such a big deal?

Well, lets think about this from the perspective of a client executive trying to implement an EPM platform within their company, and this picture starts to get confusing and frustrating. Not only are they forced to deal with each of these four domains with the vendor community, but they are forced to deal with the very same internal factions and silos within their own Organization. I can’t think of many (actually any) other disciplines that carry this much confusion around roles, processes, and systems within a business. Having to wade through that kind of maze wastes valuable time and energy that could otherwise be spent on implementing a far better and more effective EPM solution.

Some of us in the performance management community have made our humble contributions to clear up some of this confusion. For example, we’ve started to see the term BUSINESS performance management used to differentiate it from the appraisal and compensation stuff. Or “portfolio performance management” to describe how PM applies to our investment portfolios. I’ve even seen the term “operational performance management” used to describe how this discipline applies to operating units versus executive groups. But does any of this really help, or does it further confuse things? As if the HR guys aren’t focused on BUSINESS performance management…or that the OPM guys don’t care about EPM or PPM…and that this is all somehow separate from what the “BI folks” focus on— come on!!!

My not so humble opinion is that we should drop all these semantic gyrations, and focus more on what we are trying to create collectively. Performance management is an INTEGRATED CORPORATE PROCESS that includes ALL of the above. But until we think about this as one unified discipline, and one unified process, we will never have the kind of substantive impact on the business that we all know is possible (and very likely even bigger than any of us can individually see today).

Now there are most certainly organizations out there who do in fact “get it” from an integrated standpoint. But from first hand experience, I can tell you that these companies have fought an uphill battle all the way- one that has only been made more difficult by those inside the profession itself…including many of the current thought leaders in each of these arenas.

I’d like to see more effort by the collective performance management community…within and across all of these disciplines to align around a more integrated definition of performance management, and a common approach to deploying an integrated performance management platform, rather than four individual solutions. Sure, we’ll bring all these capabilities to the table to enable that…but let’s start viewing these components as pieces of the puzzle rather than each continuing to view theirs separate and distinct solutions.

Call me naive if you will, but I think this all starts by stopping all this “silo style” dialogue and begin spending way more time speaking with a common voice and more integrated narrative.

I invite some healthy debate and dialogue around this topic, so please forward your thoughts and comments and we’ll see if we don’t make some bigger progress in the months and years ahead.

-b

Author: Bob Champagne is Managing Partner of onVector Consulting Group, a privately held international management consulting organization specializing in the design and deployment of Performance Management tools, systems, and solutions. Bob has over 25 years of Performance Management experience and has consulted with hundreds of companies across numerous industries and geographies. Bob can be contacted at bob.champagne@onvectorconsulting.com

What Can Social Media Teach Us About Performance Management?

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I suspect, quite a bit.

While I’ve worked in a number of different industries in the Performance Management discipline, I must admit that I’m relatively new to this whole Social Media thing. One of the things that quickly became very clear to me is that the vast majority of posts- be it on twitter, blog sites, or discussion boards that focus on the subject of Performance Management, Measurement, or BI (Business Intelligence) in general, tends to be geared to those disciplines as they relate to Social Media.

Now, either this is an industry where the “management of performance” is at a level so disproportionately higher than any other in today’s society (which I find doubtful given the state of Business Performance in general), or it is simply one where the majority of developers and advocates of BI solutions happen to find themselves playing in today. Or it is because the users of social media have found it so useful in their marketing, sales, and CRM processes, that playing in this space is of such paramount importance to their competitive success. Or perhaps it is simply because social media, by its very nature, is quite an addictive “sport”, behaviorally driving them to expand their network and  crave the “daily fix” of data that tells them how they are doing.

Quite frankly I don’t really care which it is, and neither should you. Most likely, it’s a combination of all of the above. But regardless of what is driving this passion for performance information, the manner in which performance is being proactively managed in this space is quite impressive, and carries with it some interesting dynamics worth noting and taking back into our businesses where performance improvement REALLY MATTERS!

Here are a few of my observations on why it works so well in social media space:

  • Data Visualization– from both a creative and simplicity standpoint. Just a quick scouring of the internet yields hundreds of websites that offer a variety of visualization tools that offer easy to read/ easy to interpret metrics that can tell you how you are doing in a single snapshot. I’ve worked with organizations that spend thousands, if not millions of dollars installing performance dashboards that quitefrankly don’t hold a candle to the style and simplicity of some of these tools. And while I don’t underestimate the nature and complexity of some of these “corporate projects” (data gathering, conditioning, integration, report generation, cultural dynamics, etc.), the fact is that many of them have missed the importance of the visualization part altogether. In my 20+ years of working in the field of Performance Management, the most important thing I’ve learned is that the ability to communicate messages and results is the MOST VITAL part of making the system work, and data visualization is the key to that. Social Media analytics have made significant advances in this regard, and offer many good ideas that we should all start looking at to improve our BPM processes.
  • Ease of access, and ease of use– Simply stated, the performance analytics in this space are cheap and easy. Notice I don’t say cheap and dirty, because they’re not. No matter what tool you end up using in this arena, they are all usually one click away. They don’t require big downloads, layers of security, or complex set up. Even those that require a subscription cost only a few bucks a month. Now I’m not suggesting you can set up a corporate wide EPM reporting system for 100 bucks a month (although a small business probably could !), I am saying that we can certainly take a page out of their playbook. Fact is, the part where our effort and resources should be strongest is in selecting the right metrics, setting the right targets, and shaping the culture to fully leverage the information at hand- NOT in creating  (or in some cases REINVENTING) new applications, when there are those  that might be able to simply “plug and play” with our existing process and data. Now before I get an earful from the myriad of software vendors out there who think I am way over simplifying this, I would ask a few simple questions. Why is it that companiesstill try to manage data using their antiquated excel and access tools and data models? Why is it that companies who do invest millions in “big time” BI systems and solutions still struggle so much in getting users to actually USE their reports in the day to day management of the business. More often than not simple is better.
  • Focus on the result desired– How many of you would  admit to actually “getting lost in the data” from time to time? I’m betting quite a few. I cant tell you how many times I see organizations tracking dozens of performance stats, but give me blank stares when I ask them what their desired performance outcomes are, or what their targets should be for the coming years. Yet many of the tools in Social Media space seem to start at the beginning with those very questions, as they should. Many of these tools, begin by explaining WHY certain metrics matter. They proceed to tell you HOW these metrics impact each other. And the good ones take your right into the space of actually setting your targets, with some even providing useful benchmarks that align directly with your desired outcomes.
  • The gaming mindset– whether you call this “gamification” (a term that is used in the industry to describe how effective companies harness consumers’ inherent  desire to “participate in a game”- be it the collection of “badges” on face-book games, to the age old loyalty programs of the airlines and hotels), or simply recognize it for what it is- practices than encourage simple behavior modification (remember Skinner’s pigeons?). The fact is that most human beings resonate with this. If we can accept the fact that this behavior pattern exists, then we can also begin to ask ourselves how it can work inside our businesses. People wake up day in and day out to check their Facebook counts, twitter stats or online game rankings. We should be able to build that same dynamic into wanting to see the same kind of “performance updates” in the workplace. I submit that there are two reasons why this hasn’t occurred (beyond the fact that people care about themselves more than they do the workplace). First, we haven’t kept it simple enough (its hard to get interested in 100 metrics or metrics we don’t understand). And second, we as managers haven’t made it something they should care about. Once you’ve captured their interest, the driving desire to understand and analyze “why” will soon follow. 
  • They understand COMMUNITY, and where they live- Often literally. Human beings, whether at home or on the job tend to harness the power of those around them to increase their enjoyment, quality of life and need for interaction. Social media by its definition has tapped into that and really made it a thriving business. But what does this mean in the workplace? Our IT systems in business tend to be used only for quantitative data and analysis. But what if we could mine that data so that we can understand what our employees and managers really CARE ABOUT. Where is the dialogue focused? What do they talk about and care about? When do they talk? What trends are they worried about? Perhaps this may sound a bit far fetched for the business community, but I am of the believe that there is a world of data out there that we could really harness in getting metrics and performance issues on the radar screens of our stakeholders, and in the right context.

    Twitter Analytics- A typical "tweet cloud" showing density of discussion topics and interests based on past cloud interaction

     

    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

    There are probably a myriad of reasons that I haven’t named here, and certainly I invite you to add to my list. But these strike me as a good starting point in understanding how we can begin to translate these ideas back to the business setting  so that we can better leverage the investments we continue to make in our own performance improvement efforts.

-b

Author: Bob Champagne is Managing Partner of onVector Consulting Group, a privately held international management consulting organization specializing in the design and deployment of Performance Management tools, systems, and solutions. Bob has over 25 years of Performance Management experience and has consulted with hundreds of companies across numerous industries and geographies. Bob can be contacted at bob.champagne@onvectorconsulting.com