Enterprise Performance Competence - which in my mind is: the ABILITY TO PERFORM TASKS - TO PRODUCE OUTPUTS - TO STAKEHOLDER REQUIREMENTS - requires the performers to "learn" the appropriate response to each situation. There are many way to learn this. And there are a variety of Formal and Informal approaches to encourage and enable this learning to take place, either BEFORE the need and/or DURING the need.
As always - it depends.
A client of mine back in the early 1980s once stated with pride that his organization valued people being "Maze-Bright." That's the ability to "figure it out"
- to "master the maze" - and to "perform in spite of the maze" I recon.
That "maze" stuff is now less talked/ written about due to all of the Business Process Engineering and ReEngineering that's happened - also formally and informally - since the 1980's craze with that silver bullet.
But perhaps not. Maybe it is coming back round for a revisit now known as something different....
Perhaps many find that appealing because they have not or can not find a way to approach the learning needs of jobs, teams, departments, functions, business units, and the entire Enterprise - and can come up with nothing more than a Wants Assessment versus a performance-based Needs Assessments.
I start my Needs Assessments with a group of hand-picked Master Performers. Because we want everyone else to emulate them. learn their tips and tricks. And because if I interview them one at a time they'll miss up to 80% of what a novice really needs to learn. And observing them one at a time is too time consuming - too much cycle time and cost.
Can the Needs Assessment be done better, faster and cheaper?
Yes.
I work with my Analysis Team of Master Performers to create my version of a WBS - a Work Breakdown Structure - by creating a set of Areas of Performance (AoPs) for a job Performance Competence Requirements, or for a team (a roll up), a department (a roll-up), a function ( an roll up), a business unit (a roll up) and the Enterprise 9 the final roll up).
Here are a set of AoPs for a Sales Representative who has a large geographical territory, has prioritized accounts, and has sales plan targets per customer and prospects, and has to master the sales process as well as product knowledge and perform continuous customer service...
Once I have that WBS of AoPs in hand - I can start to capture relevant data (relevant to my downstream needs in my version of an ADDIE approach to engineering an instructional product (or product set)) in my Performance Model charts.
The PM Chart data can be derived from Process Maps if available - to ensure that the more detailed PMs align exactly to any other description of the process or job, or can be chunked out to overlay to some other descriptor. The PM ensures a "process-orientation" to everything else - which helps with "authenticity" issues/needs, as well as later being central to your Change Management Systems for all of your Instructional and Informational Content.
But if there is no set of Process Maps already available - I don't create them - unless asked to - and that's something that's created using the AoPs and Performance Model Chart's data. It's a roll up.
The PM Chart captures the Outputs and their key measures, formal or not - plus the associated tasks, the task-sets, a cluster of tasks per output. Most Enterprises' don't really have formal measures in place across all jobs - some jobs like sales, but not most jobs, leaving most to Informal Measurement, but Master Performers know what these informal measures truly are. That's just one of the many things that they have mastered. And they know what the informal standards are. And any Formal Standards.
After the tasks are determined the roles/responsibilities (not shown in graphic here) can be linked back to each task.
Here the next column captures the Voice of the Master Performers and their collective/collaborative view on the typical Performance gaps - where the typical performer is not "hitting" the measures' informal standards well enough - or their focus is on the wrong things.
I believe that it is important to capture these gaps from ideal and to not just focus on the positive things already going on - and avoiding the moose in the room of gaps from ideal, from standard, formal or not. Appreciative Inquiry is never going to fix a design flaw in an army tank. Or a mechanical deflect in the wing frame on a jet airliner. Or the shortages of critical materials to the process. Or the abusive practices by some bosses.
It'll help us celebrate the wonderfulness of our best practices as practiced by some/a few, and help others learn from that too. But avoiding what's not ideal and addressing that/those leaves a lot of performance improvement potential "on the table" - so to speak.
So we would want to look at that - what's not ideal everywhere - and why? Why haven't everyone else already mastered these places in performance where most performers are not performing to ideal - an ideal that isn't un-real, just ideal. It is a level of performance already achieved by a few or maybe many, but not all, performers.
As always - it depends.
So the last part of the gap analysis is to determine what are the "probable causes" as opposed to a more time-consuming effort at "root causes" - are they due to a lack of K/Ss? Or Attributes/Values? Or are they due to a lack of Environmental Supports?
I separate the two types of "human assets" from the one broad category of Environmental Supports (which are more detailed in my EPPI methods than in my ISD focused PACT Processes methods). Some of the human assets can be addressed by Training/ Learning/ Knowledge Management - and others cannot. And the lack of Environmental Supports definitely cannot be fixed by Training/etc. But the learners/Performers can be forewarned.
And being forewarned is being forearmed. And that's a good thing!
There are three basic types of task-sets in my thinking.
Typical/ Routine. Atypical/ Non-Routine. And Rare/ Unlikely.
In the typical/ routine task-set situation, once learned the need for continuously doing the performance will reinforce the knowledge/skills needed. This is where one must be on guard for bad practices that over time become the practices of many. Where this is risky and/or costly the Enterprise addresses this by potentially many means. Policy changes, training, etc., etc.
Perhaps Informal Learning is best. Perhaps old Joe or Jasmine can teach Guy the new guy what Guy needs when he needs it. I learned the job of sales clerk that way at a Do-It-YourSelf Lumber Yard in the mid-late 1970s while in college. Albert told Guybert what Guy needed to know as Guy dealt with customers when we were busy - and otherwise over Albert shoulder has he dealt with customers.
When he was satisfied that I had learned something - say about windows, plywood or roofing shingles, he would direct customers to me - unless there was a sales contest on - and then it was every man/woman for themselves. Then there was less learning from the Informal Learning approach.
I mastered kitchen cabinets on my own during a big promotion - and I was the top sales person for 4 months during that promotion - as a student working 24-30 hours a week. If you are motivated you can learn a lot even with very little Formal Instruction. If your employees are not motivated - then having Formal Instruction may not be effective anyway.
With the knowledge and insight of what ideal performance is, and where the typical gaps are, one can think about the ROI for addressing those routine task-sets via Formal Learning or Informal Learning - and where Murphy lies - as in: Murphy's Law - as in: If anything can go wrong it probably will.
But some task-sets are less routine. Either less seldom and/or on demand and not predicatable.
Having some clarity and documentation about Performance Competence enables a focused, collaborative view - otherwise everyone's mental models are different, their language is different, and their points are interpreted with greater and not lesser variation.
And there are those Performance Competence requirements that are "from left field" - highly unlikely - but of high RISK and/or high REWARD that you really do need to prepare for them, unlikely as they might be.
And within those there still lies in wait - MURPHY. Unlikely too, but a potential threat.
After demystifying the authentic performance context with the AoPs and Performance Model Charts - one can prioritize targets due to their high RISKS/REWARDS potential and target testing and/or assessments of terminal performance competence and enabling K/Ss if really warranted and worth that cost to administer and track.
Assess Performance Competence is easy with the PM Chart data in hand. Imagine having that data for the following Call Center Sales Job...
If you needed/wanted to test Knowledge/Skills then determining all of those K/Ss that enable performance can be systematically derived - from the Performance Model Charts' data.
I use 17 categories of K/Ss - to leave no stone unturned. And to link to my "object-oriented" design methods (later/ downstream)...
Here is how I think about testing/assessing for Typical/ Routine...
Here is how I think about testing/assessing for Atypical/ Non-Routine...
And because this is important too - here is how I think about testing/assessing for Rare/ Un-Likely...
The analysis methods are described in many of my articles - going back to 1984 in Training Magazine and ISPI's P&I Journal. This is also covered in my book: lean-ISD.
The Performance testing aspects in this Post are covered more extensively in my book: Performance-based Employee Qualification/ Certification Systems, co-authored with Ray Svenson.
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