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OCR for page 12
If you are striving to reach the frontier representing the
best of possible performances, you can take pride in
working toward being the best you can be.
Benchmarking has greatly benefited private industry. Firms have
found that they cannot survive and thrive without being acutely
conscious of how well their competitors perform in serving their
customers. For the public sector to thrive in an increasingly
competitive environment, it too must strive to understand how
to best serve its customers. Customer-driven benchmarking is an
important tool for accomplishing that goal.
PREREQUISITES FOR CUSTOMER-DRIVEN BENCHMARKING
There are three prerequisites for successful customer-driven
benchmarking:
1. Leadership. Customer-driven benchmarking, in most cases,
will require a complete reorientation of the maintenance
organization from thinking about maintenance resources,
production, and activities to thinking about the maintenance
products and services that are important to customers and the
efficiency and effectiveness with which those products and
services are delivered. This reorientation requires the
strongest support from the head of maintenance. Usually the
full endorsement of the chief executive officer will also be
required. Without the leadership to bring about this change,
customer-driven benchmarking will not succeed.
Another part of the leadership imperative is to commit the
agency to benchmarking. The time, effort, staff resources, and
attention to detail required of the organization cannot be
underestimated. You need to use the same performance
measures as your benchmarking partners, and most likely
you will not have the same measures to start with. You will
have to work hard to agree on what these measures will be.
You need to collect data in accordance with a rigorous plan.
You need to document the practices of subunits in your
agency and share the practices with your benchmarking
partners if they are different from those of your
organizational subunits. You need to make a commitment to
implement new ideas found elsewhere and to set
improvement targets. You will also need to think about
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Chapter 1: Introduction to Benchmarking
whether measured performance and new practices ought to
result in a reallocation of resources.
2. Culture. The culture must support the idea of continuous
quality improvement. Customer-driven benchmarking
requires a culture that is not satisfied with the status quo.
Before customer-driven benchmarking begins, the
maintenance organization must have made a substantial
transformation toward continuous improvement and must be
looking to others for better ways to serve its customers. This
culture comes from leadership that continually seeks and
studies success, is quick to admit failure, and rewards honest
improvement and real effort to improve.
Culture and Management Responsibilities
. . . Changing the Focus from "What's Wrong" to "What's Right and
Successful"
Many organizations have a culture that tends to focus on the lower-
performing units in the organization and to fix what is wrong.
Benchmarking is different: it focuses on the best-performing units and seeks
to understand why they are performing so well. In this new culture,
management must want to understand the reasons for success and
encourage everyone to recognize the possibility of change and improvement.
Management also needs to challenge the organization to overcome the "not
invented here" syndrome and to look elsewhere for ways to improve.
3. Agreed-upon measures. Participants in customer-driven
benchmarking must agree on the measures they will use. It is
much easier to reach agreement on measures if an agency
plans to benchmark internally--across districts, areas, or
garages--rather than externally--from one state or city to
another. Even if an agency chooses to benchmark internally,
many organizations do not have suitable customer-driven
outcome measures. Many states lack customer survey
information that is statistically valid at the county, sub-
county, or area level of the organization, and they have few
relevant technical measures of performance--for example,
reflectivity of pavement markings. When benchmarking
externally, it is much more challenging to identify relevant
measures in each agency that are the same. Indeed, a major
effort will be required by participating organizations to forge
agreement on the measures to be used. Unless the measures
are the same, there is no basis for reliable benchmarking. It is
also critical that data be collected that fits the measures.
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