Digital Performance Management as an Iterative Management Continuum

Managing digital performance and improving business achievement as an iterative continuum means setting metrics, adjusting plans, measuring performance and understanding results dynamically. 

Enterprise Performance Management is a multidisciplinary management system to run numbers in context, leverage data to tell stories. The ultimate goal of performance management is to implement business strategy effectively through well defining the right set of measures at both strategic and tactical level. Without measurements, it can be hard to tell whether attempted improvements achieve the expected results or not. The whole issue is to have a starting point and the performance metrics that come first at a strategic level are doing the job well for achieving the defined goals. With the increasing pace of changes and dynamic business planning, digital performance management is not composed of some linear steps, but an iterative management continuum.

Performance Management as an ongoing process: Define and prioritize your constellation of business goals, and start implementing them step-wisely. Metrics can help you get some objective perspectives on what you are trying to manage, but they need to be crafted and interpreted well. The business leaders need to clarify how you will measure success in meeting the business purpose and vision. Who and what tools are being applied to measure business performance? Which management metrics should you apply to measure organizational overall health and maturity? Metrics provide feedback. Businesses need to avoid vanity metrics and really focus on key metrics that correlate to better business outcomes. Ensure that these measures are quantitative, and implement whatever mechanisms you need to be able to gather the data. The right metric is requested in the right context, clarify the big "WHY" of the performance measurement is requested. Performance-based management requires that the measurement and communication of performance are an integral part of an ongoing process and not an annual, quarterly, or monthly event. The holistic and iterative performance management approach means to well align the strategic level of measures with operational level metrics and manage business performance as an iterative management continuum.

Metrics are part of transparent visual management allowing to keep pulling the business resource together and moving the organization forward: The effective measurements selected should be part of a link of cause-and-effect relationships, ending in financial objectives that ultimately affect the growth and long-term perspective of the organization. As such, the process of defining and the creation of personal and unit objectives must be constructed within the goals and objectives of the business plan. The traditional performance management is often based on more static processes or linear steps to measure defined goals and objective. But running a real-time digital business means having the organizational adaptability to evolve emerging events or disruptive changes. Thus, the business performance management needs to enforce timely communication and make sure measuring things really mattering, and measuring them in the right way. Each objective has milestones that the progress can be tracked by either the employee or manager for enabling the achievement of organizational goals and manage an iterative performance management continuum seamlessly.

Determine and manage benchmarks continually: Benchmarks is another performance aspect and a helpful instrument for comparing services horizontally. The selection of suitable "peers" to benchmark against is best driven by comparable scale and complexity of the service towers under scrutiny; which is often not limited to industry vertical or micro-vertical sectors. Benchmarking is a good measurement of tangible stuff. Benchmarking is like a quick health check which highlights the areas where improvement or a quick fix might be required. Benchmark can help management understand cost variables. However, keep in mind, value-added services are usually out of the standard benchmark scope. Business leaders have to use that benchmark data in a way that motivates and improves the organization. When organizations use it as a hammer to drive out the cost. It can become a de-motivator to the workforce and cause organizations to lose competitiveness while achieving only a short-term cost improvement.

Managing digital performance and improving business achievement as an iterative continuum means setting metrics, adjusting plans, measuring performance and understanding results dynamically. Managing a seamless digital continuum means to make a progressive journey for improving performance, expediting changes, leveraging the measurement result for making decisions to ensure the strategic goals are on the right track to achieve.

Posted in: Digital Master,IT Performance Management,Performance Master