The focus on performance management across different sectors and platforms is hardly a new attainment. Performance management practitioners and most of the business world is aware that the principles, indicators and tools used by this relatively young discipline have found their way in both the public and private sector. However, their actual presence and use remain mostly concealed.
Is having the best management tools the key to success? Analyzing the most used management tools by companies gives an insight into what really matters in today’s business world.
An article posted in 2012 on www.forbes.com discussed the changes that are likely to occur to performance management in the year 2013. Sylvia Vorhauser-Smith, author of the article, argued that no other organizational practice is more broken than performance management. The reasons she gives for this daring statement reside on the fact that people and technology have changed, as well as the relationships between them.
In healthcare, performance measurement is very important as many lives depend on the doctors’ performance, and therefore, process perfection should be promoted in this domain, together with productivity. Moreover, the hospital administration needs to know where the hospital is heading; they have to plan the budget, thus being important to consider how much money to invest in research or innovation, for instance, and how much to allocate for medicines or equipment. Furthermore, the mission of the organization should be always kept in mind, just like patient outcomes, which are a way of reflecting the image of the hospital.
“Supersector leader” in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index in 2012 and 2011, and 124 design awards in 2012. How is that possible? By having implemented a realistic performance management approach. Philips Electronics understood the importance of using performance management tools to effectively and efficiently monitor their targets, so as to reach their objectives.