Don’t donkey around with decisions Indecision can be any given organization downfall

The other day, my friend’s boss asked him: "Which maturity model would you prefer to use in this case – CMM or AIMM?" It seemed like a straightforward question at first, since both models have their strengths, but my friend found it surprisingly hard to answer. In his mind, both models carried equal weight for the situation, and he didn’t know which one he favored more.

Choice is perceived as freedom, but sometimes between two identical roads, leading to the same place, there is no effective way to choose between them.

A particular paradox suddenly comes to mind – it states that a donkey, equally hungry and thirsty, placed at the same distance between food and water would, in theory, die of both thirst and hunger as it would be paralyzed by indecision. It would basically starve to death, unable to decide which one to get to first, food or water. That’s exactly how my friend felt, trying to choose between CMM and AIMM — stuck in indecision, as both seemed equally viable.

Indecision can lead to any organization’s downfall, and we do not want to see that.

So, to do our part, we have decided to share some useful hints on how to benchmark companies with higher maturity levels.

1. Start from inside-out

(Define your process scope and objectives)

Before starting the benchmarking process, you first need to know everything there is to know about your organization. You need to clearly understand, step by step:

● The key processes or capabilities you need to improve

● The outcomes you aim at

● The right people to support you throughout the entire process.

Answering these questions will help you focus on what matters and highlight the areas you need to pay close attention to. This would be the first step to your plan for increasing business efficiency.

A short add-on we consider meaningful (since we’ve mentioned the concept of efficiency).

Interpersonal communication and knowledge transfer between people is a tough nut to crack.

Especially in benchmarking!

The perception of the used language and terminology is quite important therefore, you should pay extra attention to the terms you use. A quick and meaningful example would be the “efficiency - effectiveness” dichotomy. In both theoretical and practical spaces “efficiency” should be understood as “doing things right” and “effectiveness” as “doing the right thing”. The differences are subtle, but using the wrong terminology might induce a slightly different meaning, nullifying in this way your entire effort for proper benchmarking.

Back to our main topic

The stage we’ve spoken about above is the first step in benchmarking. And, most importantly, this is strategic in its nature. To start determining the actual maturity level of a business’s performance management system, you first need to move through several distinct stages, such as:

● Defining the range and objectives

● Pinpointing the specific areas within your business you need to evaluate and,

● Last, but definitely not least, what are the outcomes you want to capture.

2. Decide on a maturity model framework

There’s a lot of literature mentioning the (actual) available maturity models. And you can use any of them, depending on your industry, domain, or job responsibilities. Choosing a process maturity model will help you evaluating both:

● the status-quo of your maturity level and

● the improvement opportunities, as well as the current gaps.

If the first stage was a strategic one, the second one is a tactical stage. Choosing the right maturity model will influence the success of your approach on change management. As a best practice, it’s recommended to choose a model that best aligns with your industry, experience, and resources. Success in choosing the optimal model will facilitate the detection of improvement opportunities.

3. Identify benchmarking partners

To find organizations with higher maturity levels, consider the following methods: industry leaders who have a proven track record in performance management and innovation or organizations that receive awards or certifications for their performance management practices, to compare your practices against.

4. Running a maturity assessment

There is no ideal formula for how to approach this stage, but your choice should be based on your previous experiences with this sort of project and the resources availability. You can either run it internally, if you feel like the company can commit the required resources, or you can use an external assessor. As for the available data sources, there is a full range you can use, from surveys and interviews to annual reports. Alternatively, you could run a self-assessment survey to gauge internal perceptions of the maturity level of your performance management system.

The only thing you should not lose sight of is the main purpose of this step, which is: the identification of your strengths and weaknesses, as well as the potential opportunities and challenges (or SWOT analysis) you might encounter on your way to progress to a higher maturity level.

5. Benchmarking using best practices from other organizations

After finalizing the maturity assessment process, you can start benchmarking and learn from other businesses' experience, no matter if they are from the same industry or from a different one.

Alternatively use can appeal to other useful sources, such as: industry reports, case studies, publications and the list can go on but I’m sure you got the idea. Finding what others have done to increase their maturity level is doing the necessary donkey work. If time is not a scarce resource, you can even visit those companies and try to directly ask for guidance on how they did it.

The only thing you should always keep in mind is to follow those best practices that are relevant to your area and goals.

And, if you feel like your business is unique and should follow its own path, therefore nothing is applicable to you, think again. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with applying and testing solutions other businesses have tried.

Yes, they might not be a perfect match to your case but, as soon as you understand the differences between your and their cases, you can start adapting and customizing the strategies to suit your needs.

This is when you move to the next and last stage.

6. Adapting and implementing best practices that work best for your context

This last step is a straightforward one - you’ve dug through your data, analyzed others’ data, investigated successes and failures of other businesses, and learned what the proper selection criteria for your business are. It is time for customization and implementation.

Customization goes first as you must make sure the practices you’ve selected best match your specific needs and situation.

Testing goes second – without testing, everything stays at a hypothetical level. Maybe you’ve gone overboard with the research and complicated your approach a bit. Maybe your view is too simplistic for your context. Our point here is that you must test every hypothesis and idea you have.

Lastly, to make sure of your solutions’ efficiency you need to follow-up with proper tracking and measurement of the impact they generate. The work does not stop here, as you will need to improve it further as you grow as a unit.

7. Finally

We are all in a space where we can share authentic stories, helpful insights, or ask for help and, as we have said in the beginning: we are here for you.

If you want to get a second opinion, a review, or a little help to better understand what needs to be done to level up your company’s maturity level, just drop us a line.

And, don’t ever forget:

Indecision can be any organization’s downfall, as they say no one is too big or too smart to fail.