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As part of its quality services initiative, the Treasury Board Secretariat is fostering a government-wide use of benchmarking and best practices sharing. This section describes what is involved in "initiating", "supporting" and "sustaining" benchmarking and best practices sharing.[6] You should adapt the advice to your own department's situation.
The success of benchmarking and best practices sharing depends on senior executive leadership. That leadership will foster a common understanding of what benchmarking and best practices sharing means and its implications for the organization. It will also produce commitment to the concept, thereby sustaining and supporting employees and managers involved in benchmarking and best practices sharing to generate continuous improvements. To do this, the senior executive team must:
Establishing a context and a strategy statement
When benchmarking and best practices sharing are introduced into an organization, employees need to know where they fit within the existing quality and process improvement initiatives. Developing strategy statements helps legitimize their use.
Strategy 1:
To continuously improve client satisfaction and operational results by focusing benchmarking efforts on finding and implementing best practices in core business and work processes.
Strategy 2:
To share best practices throughout the organization to educate staff, accelerate continuous improvement, enhance communications and promote networking.
Creating the environment and setting expectations
For benchmarking and best practices sharing to take root, management must create an environment where there is a greater incentive to use the tools than to ignore them. This can be done by recognizing improved levels of client satisfaction and operational results from benchmarking and best practices sharing exercises. Embedding these process improvement tools in the annual business plan will also help ensure their use.
Providing management awareness training
Managers must know what benchmarking and best practices sharing are, so there is consistent implementation. Best practices sharing frequently means being involved with groups like the Interdepartmental Quality Network, the Ottawa Benchmarking Forum, or becoming used to accessing and contributing to departmental and other electronic best practices data bases. Competency in benchmarking can be obtained from training courses, seminars and conferences, articles and books, and networking with benchmarking practitioners.
Focusing activities
Most organizations designate a person or small group to ensure successful implementation of benchmarking and best practices sharing. This minimizes the risk that similar internal groups will ask the same organization for the same kind of information. Smaller organizations could assign this task to the person responsible for implementing the overall quality initiative. The group or person responsible for quality, benchmarking and best practices sharing should:
Developing guidelines
Senior management should ensure that benchmarking and best practices sharing guidelines are prepared for managers and staff. These guidelines should become the standard procedures for implementing benchmarking and best practices sharing activities. The guidelines usually outline the "what" and "how" of benchmarking and best practices sharing. They should also include details about visit protocols, information sharing and the ethical, legal, and non-disclosure considerations related to benchmarking.
Establishing an internal network
Most organizations form formal or informal networks between their functional or cross-functional benchmarking and best practices sharing representatives. These serve to source and update activities in these areas. They also fulfill the need to disseminate information and requirements throughout the organization. They can also help spread the word on benchmarking and best practices sharing.
Identifying champions and process owners
Most organizations need champions for major change initiatives. The champion's role should go beyond sponsorship to one of advocacy by challenging the leaders of the organization to aggressively pursue the use and resulting benefits of benchmarking and best practices sharing.
The champion should also be an advocate for focusing benchmarking activities on the organization's key ten to fifteen business processes. The champion should ensure that the key business processes are identified, prioritized, and benchmarked against the best processes of industry or public service leaders. Experience shows that the highest payback comes by applying benchmarking and introducing the best practices of industry leaders to these processes. In addition to champions, each process is usually assigned a "process owner". Senior level process owners are in the best position to commission teams to implement benchmarking studies on behalf of process clients/customers.
Commissioning teams
Experience shows that benchmarking teams function best with six to eight people. It is necessary that all team members should know the process being examined, however some team members should have operational experience. To maximize innovation, teams should also have at least one "blue sky" thinker and/or someone familiar with present and future information technology tools and techniques. Team members should possess analytical, research, problem-solving, process improvement, and project management skills. Teams should use an accepted benchmarking process model and protocols in order to ensure project success.
Providing team members skills training
Over and above team skills such as project management, problem-solving, and process improvement, team members need to understand:
Following an accepted benchmarking process
There are a number of well tested multi-step processes that have supplied their users with successful results. Experienced practitioners understand the need for consistent, replicable results derived from a standard way to conduct studies. A standard process ensures credibility in comparison and consistency in results.
Executive management roles and responsibilities
Executive management roles and responsibilities include:
Middle management roles and responsibilities
In addition to some of the roles and responsibilities shared with executive management, middle managers must:
Team leader roles and responsibilities
Benchmarking team leaders must:
Communicating successes
The sharing of best practices and case studies expands and intensifies buy-in and commitment to continuous improvement and benchmarking, recognizes achievement and stimulates others. Showcasing success stories can be done in many ways, including:
Introducing benchmarking and best practices sharing is an important change for many federal government departments. Therefore, managers have to structure an initiative, get the buy-in and commitment from leaders, and make sure a communications strategy is planned before actually getting into the "how-to" aspects of the process.
It is through the active involvement of leaders and employees working together to learn about, share and implement best practices; and using a systematic improvement approach, including formal benchmarking, that organizations learn, improve, and achieve excellence. Good luck in your journey of exploration, discovery, development, and evolution. This Guide will be revised as we continue to share additional knowledge, tools, techniques, and practices.
BE AWARE - COMPARE - SHARE - GET THERE