Project performance management

1. Project performance management
Performance management is the foundation of any organization that has a vision and
knows where they want to be in the near and long term future. As today's rapidly
evolving business environment challenges organizations to adapt to constant change, the
need for organizations to be sure that their projects and activities are aligned with overall
strategic goals and business objectives is critical. Performance management is the gauge
that lets you know whether or not you are reaching strategic goals and which areas within
your service delivery could use improvement. It used to be that performance was isolated
to one department. Today, every division within an organization can benefit from it.
Performance management spans across various management functions and helps ensure
that your people, processes and technology are working together to achieve your
organization's missions and goals. This article illustrates how performance management
relates to various major management support functions within your organization.
Strategic Planning
Strategic planning is the process of determining a company's long-term goals and then
identifying the best approach for achieving them. Strategic planning plays a vital role in
the performance of your organization. In order for strategic goals to be achieved, strategic
planning must be aligned to performance measurements. These performance
measurements allow executive management to gauge the effectiveness of the
organizational strategic plan and determine how the budget and projects will be setup in
the future. The strategic planning process is discussed in more detail in the planning
phase.
Organizational Development
Often used interchangeably with organizational effectiveness, organizational
development is the process through which an organization develops the internal capacity
to be the most efficient towards its mission work and to sustain itself over the long term.
This definition highlights the explicit connection between organizational development
work and the achievement of organizational mission. Performance management directly
relates to organizational development, since OD is primarily focused on improving the
performance of organizations and the people within them. Whatever your organizational
challenges, the starting point is to get a clear, objective view of your organization's
performance abilities, such as strengths and limitations. Identifying proper performance
attributes is essential, because sound management decisions can only be made when
performance attributes are identified and measured accurately. In order to reach
anticipated organizational targets, you must be able to tie the performance and motivation
of individuals to the overall strategic objectives. The Lifecycle Performance Framework
processes illustrate how performance management, organizational development and
strategic planning share interrelated processes to accomplish organizational goals.

2. Organizational development processes are discussed in more detail in the planning and
execution phases.
Change Management
Change management is a systematic approach to dealing with change within every
perspective of an organization, from systems to personnel to projects to functions.
Change management is a comprehensive, often difficult management function to properly
implement. There's the saying "Organizations don't adapt to change; their people do."
With that outlook, it is easy to understand how performance management plays a critical
part in managing change. Implementing change within an organization often requires a
change in how employees execute things. You can implement the most advanced change
management tools money can buy, but if your people don't buy into or fully support the
initiatives, their performance will suffer and ultimately the organization will be
ineffective, or less efficient than before.
Every system, personnel, and procedural change within an organization should be
implemented with the goal of achieving an improvement in performance some form. The
actual improvement should be compared to the predicted improvement to assess the
effectiveness of the change. This guide discusses managing your organization during its
many changes throughout the performance lifecycle.
Project Management
Project management is the discipline of organizing and managing resources (e.g. people)
in such a way that the project is completed within defined scope, quality, time and cost
constraints. A project is a temporary and one-time endeavor undertaken to create a unique
product or service, which brings about beneficial change or added value. Performance
measurement is an area within the Project Management Institute's Project Management
Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). It is the link between performance management and
project management, where cost, schedule and scope performance are measured and
monitored throughout each phase of the Project Lifecycle. Project performance reporting
is the process of collecting project baseline data and distributing performance information
to stakeholders throughout the project. Implementing project performance measurement
ensures that your reporting clarifies how resources are being used to obtain the objectives
of the project. Measuring project performance is discussed in detail in the monitoring
phase.
Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is the measurement or determination that a product or service
meets a customer's expectations, based on predetermined quality and service
requirements. It is said that customer satisfaction equals perception of performance
divided by expectation of performance. There is a direct relationship between
performance and customer satisfaction, where the better you perform to customer
expectations, the more satisfied customers will be. Customer satisfaction is your

3. organization's level of performance through your customers, employees, and/or
stakeholders perspective. In fact, many times customer satisfaction feedback, if requested
properly, can provide information and insight for achieving breakthrough increases in
organizational performance and effectiveness. When measuring customer satisfaction,
organizations should review their objectives and ensure that the customer service strategy
is linked to those objectives. How to ensure that your organizational objectives are linked
to your customer service strategy are discussed in the reporting phase.
Workforce Performance Management
Workforce performance management is the strategic alignment of an organization's
human capital with its business activities. It is a methodical process of analyzing the
current workforce, determining future workforce needs, identifying the gap between the
present and future, and implementing solutions so the organization can accomplish its
mission, goals, and objectives.
People are the most important aspect to any organization. Therefore, the performance of
the people within an organization will greatly impact the overall performance of the
organization. While most employees understand what they need to do, workforce
performance management tells them how well they must do it. The greatest benefit to
workforce performance management is the process of aligning employee performance to
organizational objectives and goals. This guide explains how to evaluate individuals on
their alignment with corporate goals and their contributions to business results in the
planning section. Functions within workforce performance management are Recruit and
Hire Management, Compensation Management, Incentive Management, Goals
Management, Learning Management, Competency Management, and Performance
Measurement. These functions are described in the executing phase.
IT Performance Management
IT performance management assists organizations with the increasing demands of
maximizing value creation from technology investments, reducing risk from IT,
decreasing architectural complexity, and optimizing overall technology expenditures.
Behind people, technology is the next critical factor in maximizing efficiency and
organizational performance. Many organizations from small to large are using IT
strategically to support profitable growth. IT performance management includes
maximizing technology to improve service delivery in every area of the organization. IT
performance management utilizes such technology as unified management reporting and
dashboard tools to enhance performance and drives business processes. How to find the
right technologies to enhance your business intelligence, and choosing the right business
intelligence tools are discussed in detail in the reporting phase.
Knowledge Management
Knowledge management refers to the guidelines, policies, and practices that an
organization uses to create and transfer information to support the performance of the

4. people in the organization. These can include various documents and copyrights, and
intangible processes, models and methods that their people use to get work done. The
impact of knowledge management on key business results is seen through its potential for
improving the performance of business processes. Take call centers for example. They
may handle hundreds, even thousands of calls a day. It would be too much too ask for
call center representatives to be able to resolve the majority of these calls without a
knowledge management system in place. With a knowledge management system, the call
center representatives have more information and resources to access and can thus
resolve more customer requests. Performance benefits can be seen in such areas as first
call resolution, time to resolve, and customer satisfaction. Knowledge management drives
performance by linking knowledge to critical functions which impact business and
putting the supports in place to ensure knowledge is leveraged across people and
circumstances.
Quality Management
Quality management is a method for ensuring that all the activities necessary to design,
develop and implement a product or service are effective and efficient with respect to the
system and its performance. Quality management includes several processes that enable
organizations to ensure quality. Among them are quality planning, quality assurance,
quality control, quality audits and quality surveillance. Quality planning is defined as a
set of activities whose purpose is to define quality system policies, objectives, and
requirements, and to explain how these policies will be applied, how these objectives will
be achieved, and how these requirements will be met. It is always future oriented. Quality
assurance (QA) is defined as a set of activities whose purpose is to demonstrate that an
entity meets all quality requirements. QA activities are carried out in order to inspire the
confidence of both customers and managers, confidence that all quality requirements are
being met.
Quality control is defined as a set of activities or techniques whose purpose is to ensure
that all quality requirements are being met. In order to achieve this purpose, processes are
monitored and performance problems are solved. Quality audits examine the elements of
a quality management system in order to evaluate how well these elements comply with
quality system requirements. Quality surveillance is a set of activities whose purpose is to
monitor an entity and review its records to prove that quality requirements are being met.
Performance measurement is a necessary instrument for quality management because in
order to measure quality, you must first apply performance expectations and standards. In
the PMBOK, the performance measurement process group falls under the quality
management knowledge area. Quality management is discussed in greater detail in the
monitoring phase.
Process Improvement
Process improvement is a series of actions taken to identify, analyze and improve existing
processes within an organization to meet new goals and objectives. There are many
process improvement methodologies that differ in approach, but the one thing they all

5. have in common is the outcome of better performance. In fact, by definition performance
improvement is the concept of measuring the output of processes or procedures, then
modifying the processes or procedures in order to increase the output, increase efficiency,
or increase the effectiveness of the processes or procedures. Often times, the most critical
processes that impact business success are those that require support from multiple
functional groups. Identifying and managing cross-functional processes and removing the
functional silos that inhibit business culture are discussed in great detail in the planning
and executing phases.
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