Manage and Align Performance by Applying Uniform Standards

The more contractors or departments involved in a project, the greater the risk of variation and, often, confusion. There is always the risk of misalignment and miscommunication. The larger the organization, the greater the risk of missing cues on priorities and direction. For the process owner, the challenge is to align the team to drive progress toward the goal. For the team member, the question is identifying the actions that will drive progress across the entire system and managing and aligning performance at both the global and local levels. To put it more simply, how does the actor at the local level know which actions to take to drive the system toward the global objective? How does the process owner know whether the team is doing the right things to move progress toward the goal?

In a practical sense, if I’m a leader of an organization, how do I know my team is doing the right things? If I’m a team member, how do I know which actions to take?

Every organization is formed for a purpose. To achieve its purpose and goals, organizations develop around sub-organizations (functions) and processes that accomplish them. These sub-organizations then have their own purpose and goals. For example, accounts payable’s goal is to ensure bills are paid. Presumably, each of these sub-organizations is aligned with the overall goals and objectives of the global organization.

As the organization becomes more complex, maintaining alignment becomes more challenging, so the organization establishes performance management systems to align purpose and activity across the constituent (local) organizations. These systems are often referred to colloquially as “the measurement system” or “the metrics”. Managers seek the relevant measurements to make decisions and drive appropriate behavior in the enterprise, whether to correct a course of action, direct a new course, or even stop.

The performance management system is the formal and informal process of measuring and responding to organizational processes to achieve its goal(s). It establishes and applies uniform standards, quantifying and managing process performance.

• Establish the standards. Create a common performance benchmark. This can take the form of a database of work to be done, a common set of objectives, or even an agreed-upon set of goals. If you don’t know what the objective is, anything will be acceptable. So be purposeful and deliberate about determining your direction. Essentially, the standards are the “why” behind what is to be performed.
• Know the process. The process is the “what” – the details that determine your progress toward success. If you have never mapped the process or supply chain, now is the time to do it! It’s essential to know the required behaviors and the results of those behaviors – you can’t measure what you can’t quantify.
• Create decision gates. Now that you have mapped the process and can clearly articulate the steps toward the goal, you can identify where decisions need to be made. Quantify the decision process – who can make which decisions and when escalation is required.
• Identify the constraint. Now that the process is mapped and all steps are clear, you can see where the bottlenecks are and what is holding up the process or the supply chain from moving faster – you can focus on the areas that are most critical.

During the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP built the largest civilian maritime fleet ever seen (over 14,000 vessels). In the haste to contain the spill, keeping detailed records was not a priority. Equipment was rented and used without documentation, and boats were commissioned to clean oil without any record of their model or serial number. This lack of communication and documentation became a major problem when it was time to decontaminate the cleanup vessels. We applied these lessons to drive the process and completed a task in less than six months that was originally estimated to take years. These lessons worked in the worst conditions; imagine how they could help you now.

Lesson 6 of my eBook, Achieving Top Performance Under the Worst Conditions: 7 Lessons Learned from a Disaster, shows how we achieved great results by applying uniform standards.