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Chapter 2: Selecting Benchmarking Partners
long as it remains involved, but may leave the partnership at
any time without cause. It is a mistake to include stringent exit
procedures, because they will discourage potential partners
from entering the agreement. Partners will remain involved as
long as the partnership provides compelling benefits by
showing organizations how they can improve performance as a
result of adopting best practices.
Sample Benchmarking Agreement
Appendix A includes a sample agreement suitable for customer-
driven benchmarking of road maintenance.
ENROLLING BENCHMARKING UNITS
IN EACH ORGANIZATION
Once you have developed a benchmarking agreement with your
partners, you need to recruit units within your agency to
participate in benchmarking activities. Ideally, you will have
taken this step before you signed the benchmarking agreement
so that you have buy-in. Even so, you will have more to do to
solidify the participation of the benchmarking units so that you
can proceed to measure and analyze performance.
By the time you sign a benchmarking agreement with your
partners, you will probably know at what level of the
organization you plan to benchmark and will have a general
agreement to participate from the managers responsible for those
organizational units. This understanding is more likely to have
been reached at the middle and higher levels (e.g., garage level or
higher) than at the crew level. You will need to fully engage the
lower levels of the organization that are directly responsible for
performing maintenance work. This is important because you
will need to rely on work units to provide an accurate
description of work methods, including labor, equipment and
material used, as well as their role in the overall business
processes of providing a maintenance product or service. In
addition, you may need the cooperation of the work units in
order to gather information not normally recorded in daily work
reports, although crews should not be expected to collect data on
outcomes. If there are possible barriers to engaging crews
because of collective bargaining agreements, you may need to
work with union representatives.
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