Action Steps to Bring Business Performance Management to Your Business
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

Review business performance management software

Discuss the pros and cons of implementing business performance improvement solutions with your staff. Business performance improvement software uses data from your financial system to conduct business performance management analysis, produce detailed reports and enhance your perspective on the areas that need improvement in your business.

I recommend: Schedule a presentation of business management performance solution software to evaluate at the benefits and how they would be implemented by your firm. PivotLink and Infor are both well know software products designed to provide improved analysis and enhance decision making.

Read about business performance management

Expand your knowledge of performance management concepts and the role of business performance management consultants by reading about corporate performance management and how it can lead to business improvement. Talk to your key personnel about the impact of these materials on their perspective and how they see it being implemented in your firm.

I recommend: Look at books available from IBM Redbooks or purchase The Performance Manager to learn more about the latest trends and techniques that are being successfully implemented in other companies. Absorb their successes and failures to help identify the best way to implement business performance management in your firm.

Subscribe to business performance management magazines

Learn about the key performance indicators of business performance management basics. Performance management is essentially the tracking of certain ratios and values as indicators of the relative strength and weakness within your firm. Corporate performance management tends to include merit based incentive pay, tied to these indicators to focus staff on improving business performance.

I recommend: Read Business Performance Management to expand your knowledge of performance management consulting, the ideas in the industry and how they can impact on your firm. Intelligent Enterprise provides a wealth of interesting articles on business performance management and trends within the business community.

Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

• •  The key to implementing business performance management is to get approval from your senior staff. Once they agree with the concept, they can encourage the managers and front line staff to see the benefits.

Guide to Business Performance Management

Use corporate performance management and business performance consultants to outperform your competition.

By Greg Brown

Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

Move performance management into the digital world for clarity, speed

Part of the struggle of dealing with how a company is doing is knowing. Short of having a superhuman HR director with perfect recall (and the ability to be in every division of your company at once) there is software for corporate performance management.

I recommend: It can seem colder, but performance managment software really just digitizes and automates a lot of existing business processes, like performance reviews, employee surveys, compensation plans and goal setting. See some options from Success Factors, Halogen Software and Blue. See also the comprehensive vendor list by business size at Capterra.

HIre business performance consultants to get on track

Software is a good tool, but it can also take a thorough grafting of human resources culture to get performance reviews and processes into place to begin with. Here's where bringing in a performance management consulting firm can help improve corporate performance management.

I recommend: Some business performance consultants include Westminster Associates and Grote Consulting. For more, see the Business.com directory on performance management consulting.

Business performance management is, increasingly, a financial issue

Once, you could palm off the numbers work to your chief financial officer, maybe give him or her a team and an investor relations person, then wait for the quarterly report. No more. Financial details are now a corporate performance management problem, thanks to increased regulation, even for privately held companies.

I recommend: If you think you'll seek financing, even bank financing, start keeping better track of financial performance now with scorecarding software from OutlookSoft, Lombardi, and SAS. Membership organization BPM Institute has roundtables and whitepapers on business performance management issues.

Consider a module-driven corporate performance management suite

If your company is small but on the verge of quick growth, you'll be keeping track of a lot of moving pieces -- sales, accounting, production, people, financing. A lot of vendors of very big performance software offerings can tailor a starter package for medium businesses that can grow with you.

I recommend: Some of the well-known vendors of corporate performance management software include SAS, Oracle, Business Objects and Hyperion. See more business performance consultants at the Business.com directory on performance management consulting.

Performance management consulting can set crucial benchmarks

It can all seem a bit wonky, but the work of performance management consulting has become tremendously relevant to even small and medium-sized companies. Influenced by outside factors like competition and human capital flows, companies often have trouble recognizing impending change, and managing it.

I recommend: An excellent exercise in looking inward is the balanced scorecard approach, which goes beyond project management to take into account goal setting and tracking. Learn more at the Balanced Scorecard Institute. Some major performance management consultants include Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, Cognos and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

• •  Getting the most from corporate performance management is making sure the cultural tasks of creating accountability is not passed on to software. Get training for your management in addition to programs.
• •  Business performance consultants should be hired to oversee a single change process, and in accordance with their actual previous client cases. Ask for references and specific evidence of success.
• •  Even the best human resources managers need help from the top brass to make business performance measurements work. Communicating the importance of corporate performance management yardsticks to your rank and file helps get it done.

Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

Look up Business Performance Management key terms in business dictionaries

As children, we were told to look up words we didn't know in the dictionary! Well, it's a good habit to have instilled and to cultivate it.

I recommend: 12 Manage's online glossary and dictionary is constantly updated with new terms and definitions. You can find many of the key terms used in corporate performance management. This is especially important if you are considering getting performance management consulting for your company. Another helpful glossary is provided ISSEL, a provider of business performance management software.

Look for websites on business performance improvement and corporate performance management

Websites for business performance management can also give you definitions of the key terms used in BPM, important if you want to get the most out of performance management consulting advice.

I recommend: Free Management Library is a good resource for informed explanations of key terms used in performance management. Bnet's articles on BPM highlight key terms as they are used throughout the article. You can click on the key terms as you read and get an explanation, as with the term "balanced scorecard."

Look up acronyms used in business performance management

Some writers use acronyms without ever spelling out the words they stand for. You can Google the acronym and get a fairly good definition as well as the real words behind the letters.

I recommend: OLAP is one of the stranger looking acronyms, standing for "on-line analytical processing." It is a difficult term to understand and the author of this report gives a detailed explanation. Business dashboard is a catchy term for getting a lot of information at a glance, same as a quick look at your dashboard.

Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

• •  You might notice discrepancies in some of the explanations and definitions of Business Performance Management key terms, but don't be alarmed. Generally discrepancies are due to sloppy writing. Consider the source of the key terms and do more digging if necessary.

Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

Take introductory seminars about business performance management

Start the training program by having employees learn performance management concepts. They should focus on the role that business performance consultants play and on how workflow management can improve business operations.

I recommend: Actuate offers introductory online seminars that explain the underlying concepts of business performance management. Have employees learn about common strategies for business performance improvement from one of RMS's introductory courses. Employees can attend IBM Cognos's Business Performance Management training sessions to learn about things like integrating branding with performance management.

Get helpful resources when you attend performance management seminars

Employees can take advantage of the excellent educational opportunity that comes from training with the professional performance management professionals and consultants who run training events and seminars. In particular, they can learn about new strategies like 'forced ranking' and 'talent management.'

I recommend: Global Business Consulting's seminars can help your employees understand how performance management consulting is linked to profits and enterprise goals. They'll learn how competency-based evaluations play a role in performance management. Professionals at Palladium who run these seminars will teach your employees about resources like books and business performance management software that explain the latest talent management strategies.

Register employees for seminars and workshops devoted to business improvement

Continue business performance management education and training with seminars and workshops where employees can learn best-practice tips. Particular areas of focus are project management, team design and design.

I recommend: At 80/20 Sales Performance, take seminars that will teach employees about creating effective sales performance management plans. Register for workshops at Solomon Coyle to learn how to use business performance management to enhance staff development strategies. Visit Leadership Connections for information on its effective performance management webinars given periodically.