“We aim to provide a safe, reliable and efficient railway,” is Network rail’s vision, a company in charge of running, maintaining and developing United Kingdom’s railways infrastructure (rail tracks, signalling, bridges, tunnels, level crossings, viaducts and key stations).
Both in the professional and the personal contexts our lives, performance is greatly influenced by the manner in which we perceive ourselves: the roles we have been attributed, the tasks we undertake, the levels on which we interact with others.
A prerequisite for a successul benchmarking study is to have a Total Quality Management system in place within the organization. Modern quality management entails customer satisfaction, it prefers prevention against inspection and it recognizes the managerial team’s responsibility for quality.
When a class of kindergarten children was asked to think of new uses for a paper clip, 98% of them came up with so many new ideas that they were ranked as geniuses on the creativity scale. When the same children were tested again, five years later, only 50% of them scored genius levels. Another five years and that level fell even further. It is, thus, obvious, that the standardized educational process we go through gradually relinquishes us of our creative abilities, as Sir Ken Robinson, esteemed educationalist, the coordinator of the study, concluded. Nonetheless, over 1,500 CEOs, included in an IBM survey, isolated creativity as the number one characteristic a future leader must possess in order to surface the business world of today.
The Government of Kerala closely monitors the performance of its departments in a system known as the Performance Monitoring and Evaluation System (PMES), where each department has to prepare a Results-Framework Document (RFD).
RFDs are performance reports that show how well departments have managed their performance during the previous year. They are structured into 6 parts: