SuccessfulWorkplace

You’re all fired up for the new year, right? You can just taste the 2014 achievements now as you come off the holiday break with new career resolutions and energy to carry them out. Or maybe you’re not completely fired up (or rested) but know you need to show real progress this year. If neither […]

I can’t tell you how many blogs I’ve read (or written) that started by stating “The World moves faster today than it ever has!” And, they are all correct. The business environment seems to continue to expand at an exponential rate, and that makes it especially hard for organizations to keep up. It feels like […]

I’m often asked what the first step should be once you decide you need to benchmark. I’m assuming that you have already done the vital steps of understanding the value this benchmarking effort will bring to your organization, aligned it with a current strategy or business issue, and have common agreement within your organization that […]

The ability to benchmark your organization’s performance is expanding quickly. Services for metric benchmarking, as well as qualitative (or best practice) benchmarking are growing and expanding. The market has solved barriers around security and confidentiality. If you don’t have a benchmarking source that can guarantee you that level of trust, you need to find another […]

If you’ve followed this benchmarking series, you know there has been a lot of information shared around benchmarking peer groups or those you compare yourself to when you conduct a benchmarking project. My message in this post is that you don’t have to go outside of your own organization or value chain to get highly […]

In this installment of the benchmarking series I cover team composition. The team is a critical aspect of any project and a benchmarking effort is no different. There are roles on a benchmarking team that you’d expect to see on any project team, but there are some that are unique to this type of project. […]

In part 1, of this benchmarking series, I covered a few of the instances where you might want to engage a benchmarking vendor to assist you with your projects. In this installment, I outline my recommendations around what to do when you find a vendor (or short list of vendors) that you might want to […]

This installment of the benchmarking series focuses on using benchmarking vendors and will be in two parts. This part will focus on when you might want to use a benchmarking vendor, and the second part will focus on what to do once you find a vendor. Benchmarking vendors, like all other vendor, should be held […]

In a recent post in this benchmarking series, I discussed the issues I see with defining benchmarking peer groups based on industry. That led me to share the similarities I see among great companies when they benchmark. Benchmarking roles In our benchmarking projects, there are primarily two roles. The sponsors are the organizations wanting to […]

In this entry to the benchmarking series, I want to cover the benchmarking peer group. The benchmarking peer group is both vital and controversial for the vast majority of benchmarking projects. It is an issue we discuss at the beginning of every project, and it alone can make or break a benchmarking project. But here […]

I wanted to tackle another benchmarking myth in this post. I’ve touched on it in previous posts in this series, but wanted to address it specifically. It is the myth of getting EXACTLY comparable data within peer groups. Why is it a myth? You can’t achieve the elusive “apples-to-apples” comparison when humans are involved, ever. […]

Legal concerns around benchmarking have been around since the practice really exploded in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These issues should be considered, but shouldn’t be a barrier to benchmarking. Logic and common sense should rule your benchmarking efforts well before the legal concerns. A benchmarking code of conduct to guide your activities is […]

My esteemed colleague here at SuccessfulWorkplace wrote a piece about using frameworks to help build business processes for startups when they begin to scale up operations. In the post Tom states that; To make the successful transition to the next stage of growth, companies need to formalize management, communications and processes. To a certain extent […]

In my other benchmarking posts I’ve explained that you’ll never get to a level of precision where you will truly have an exact comparative benchmark value. It has been proven and noted that the same person asked the same question will give you different answers. But, even if it were possible, you would not be […]