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Back to the Performance Improvement Journal Home PageFebruary, 2004 Editor’s Notes
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Executive Summaries
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| Sales Improvement in a Global Enterprise Through HPT by Pat McMahon, CPT As markets become more global, more complex, and more volatile, these very features begin to be reflected within the corporations that serve the markets. As sales forces need to bend and shift with the cultural winds, the strategy of managing salesperson performance and sales support performance by training alone becomes more and more inappropriate. In many cases, sales can be improved just by defining, systematizing, and adjusting the sales and sales support processes. Training is a necessary component of activating these processes, but it is by no means sufficient. In this article, a small team of human performance technologists was chartered "to identify issues and obstacles inhibiting the productivity of the sales force, and to lead projects to resolve those issues." Dramatic improvements in a sales support process were accomplished through the application of a wide range of human performance technology tools. HPT and Business Process Management by Robert Edgar Training has led to e-learning, with economies of scale and improvements in geographic and temporal delivery. As e-learning advances toward e-performance enhancement, a lateral glance reveals the new face of business process management (BPM). Employee performance can be given immediate support as required if an online learning-object library is put in the service of an online BPM system. Stewardship by Jim Hill, CPT Human performance technology practitioners must serve as stewards of the client enterprise. By focusing on managerial wants and short-term schemes to address undefined problems, resources are wasted, client value goals fall short, and the reputation of the human performance profession is undermined. Stewardship requires that practitioners, in considering alternate solutions, move beyond the more immediate program outcomes and focus on the consequences of "success" for the overall well-being of the enterprise. Negotiating and Maintaining the Spirit of a Partnership by Martha Jensen, CPT and Jeanne Farrington, CPT When making a deal between two parties-whether a large contract or an ongoing partnership-it is important to include not only clear deliverables, fees, and timelines, but also to make explicit the social and cultural expectations that each party has. The article provides a process for improving performance in partnerships by first agreeing to and then monitoring the "spirit of the deal." NonStop University: Characteristics of a Global Learning Community by Thomas P. Hill Hewlett-Packard, through its network-based NonStop University, must enable more than 2,500 employees around the world to effectively apply computer products and concepts in the culture, the market, and the local business environment of each employee. To meet this challenge, the design of NonStop University must respect issues that are not usually considered in HPT programs where the desired performance change is narrower in scope. These issues are classed as cognitive and social domain issues. This article examines the overall design of NonStop University and the processes used in the cognitive and social domains, and then discusses future directions for growth of the online service. Looking in the Mirror: Performance Improvement for Performance Improvers by Julian Martin, CPT, Carol Goldsmith, CPT, Kristin Hodges, and Peggy Parskey How do you identify and initiate the changes needed for a training organization to adopt a performance improvement approach? Is a workforce development organization able to make this move at the speed required in today's business landscape and against a background of immense change? Is human performance technology (HPT) a powerful enough methodology to survive in this business jungle? We invite managers to use HPT to examine performance gaps in their own efforts to move workforce development closer to a performance improvement culture, and to select and implement solutions to close those gaps. In using HPT methods as a metaprocess to instill HPT into a workforce development organization we ask, are you brave enough to look in the mirror, to check whether you like what you see and whether you would take appropriate actions if you are not as good looking as you imagined? Saving the World with HPT: Expanding Beyond the Workplace and Beyond the "Business Case" by James Andrews, CPT, Jeanne Farrington, EdD, CPT, Todd Packer, and Roger Kaufman, PhD, CPT Human performance technology (HPT) is a powerful tool for making things better. Over the past 20 years or so HPT practitioners have demonstrated the ability to bring comprehensive solutions to the complex problems of individual and organizational performance. What new horizons lie ahead? Can we apply our HPT skills to performance challenges beyond the workplace? Are issues of world hunger, literacy, and homeland security beyond the reach of HPT? These questions, and the pros and cons of considering them, were the subject of an innovative forum during ISPI's 41st International Performance Improvement Conference and Expo in Boston and at a subsequent Silicon Valley ISPI chapter meeting. Explore with us the boundaries of ISPI's HPT model and the implications for expanding those boundaries. See what insights your colleagues have shared, and join the dialogue!
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