Business performance management

By 2017, Gartner retired the concept of "CPM" and reclassified it as "financial planning and analysis (FP&A)," and "financial close" to reflect two concepts: increased focus on planning and the emergence of a new category of solutions supporting the management of the financial close.[9]

Innovative technologies provide one approach to collapsing this gap and allowing corporate strategic outcomes to be fully realized and risk management programs to be fully described.[10]

Performance management principles are used most often in the workplace and can be applied wherever people interact with their environments to produce desired effects, such as in health settings.[11]

The way performance management is applied is important in getting the most out of the group. It can have a positive impact on how employees perform on a day-to-day basis. In order to avoid a negative impact, it must be applied in a way that does not encourage internal competition, but rather teamwork, cooperation, and trust.[12]

Managers use performance management to align company goals with the goals of teams and employees in an effort to increase efficiency, productivity, and profitability.[13] Performance management guidelines stipulate clearly the activities and outcomes by which employees and teams are evaluated during performance appraisal.[14] Many types of organization use performance management systems (PMS) to evaluate their business according to their targets, objectives, and goals to achieve the vision of their organization. For example, research institute may use PMS to evaluate their research success in achieving specific development targets in line with the institute vision.[15] Complex multifaceted performance drivers such as societal contribution of research may be evaluated along with many other complex performance drivers like research commercialization, research collaborations, in focus of many development areas such as commercial agriculture sector.[16][17] In such cases research institute may use data-driven real-time PMS to deal with such complex performance management challenges and to be on track of research practices towards development needs of a country in achieving innovations for development of agriculture sector.[18][19]

Werner Erhard, Michael C. Jensen, and their colleagues developed a new approach to improving performance in organizations. Their model is used to stress how the constraints imposed by one's own worldview can impede cognitive abilities that would otherwise be available. Their work delves into the source of performance, which is not accessible by mere linear cause-and-effect analysis. They assert that the level of performance people achieve correlates with how work situations occur to them and that language (including what is said and unsaid in conversations) plays a major role in how situations occur to the performer. They assert that substantial gains in performance are more likely to be achieved by management understanding how employees perceive the world and then encouraging and implementing changes that make sense to employees' worldview.[20]

In the public sector, the effects of performance management systems have differed from positive to negative, suggesting that differences in the characteristics of performance management systems and the contexts into which they are implemented play an important role to the success or failure of performance management.[21][22]

Managers who are not clear in their expectations may end up with employees who believe that have been doing a great job, when they have been doing something other than what has been asked of them.

Employees who question how fair the performance management system is will discredit its effectiveness. An example of this would be a high level of internal competition within the performance management system. This will cause those who do not get rewarded to be disgruntled with the process. Additionally, without proper implementation in the planning of the performance management system, employees may view the process as something they must have compliance with. This will result in a less proactive and more inaccurate representation of the performance of an employee.[23]

In organizational development (OD), performance can be thought of as Actual Results vs Desired Results. Any discrepancy, where Actual is less than Desired, could constitute the performance improvement zone. Performance management and improvement can be thought of as a cycle:

1. Performance planning where goals and objectives are established
2. Performance coaching where a manager intervenes to give feedback and adjust performance
3. Performance appraisal where individual performance is formally documented and feedback delivered

A performance problem is any gap between Desired Results and Actual Results. Performance improvement is any effort targeted at closing the gap between Actual Results and Desired Results.[24]

Other organizational development definitions are slightly different. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) indicates that Performance Management consists of a system or process whereby:

1. Work is planned and expectations are set
2. Performance of work is monitored
3. Staff ability to perform is developed and enhanced
4. Performance is rated or measured and the ratings summarized
5. Top performance is rewarded.[25]

An organization-wide 360-degree feedback process integrated into its culture can be a powerful tool for communicating and instituting change, rapidly touching all members of the organization when new markets, strategies, values and structures are introduced into the system.[26]

Each year companies spend millions on their performance management systems. In order for performance management to be successful, businesses must continue to adapt their system to correct their current deficiencies. Some aspects may resonate more with employees compared to others (e.g., goal setting or performance bonuses).[27]

Because of business performance management, activities in large organizations often involve collecting and reporting large volumes of data. Many software vendors, particularly those offering business intelligence tools, will market products intended to assist in this process. As a result of this marketing effort, business performance management is often incorrectly understood as an activity that relies on software systems to work, and many definitions of business performance management explicitly suggest software as being a definitive component of the approach.[30]

This interest in business performance management from the software community is interpreted by some to be sales-driven.[31]

• Behavioral systems analysis
• Data visualization
• Electronic performance support systems
• Executive information systems
• Integrated business planning
• IT performance management
• List of management topics
• Operational performance management
• Organizational behavior management
• Organizational engineering
• PDCA
• Acterys
• Performance measurement
• Vitality curve (a.k.a stack ranking)
• Strategy Markup Language and particularly StratML Part 2, Performance Plans and Reports

• Plug-In T12 Business Process http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~firat/mis/PlugInT12.pdf
• "Giving the Boss the Big Picture: A dashboard pulls up everything the CEO needs to run the show". BusinessWeek. Bloomberg L.P. 2006-02-13. Archived from the original on February 9, 2006. Retrieved 2010-02-22.
• Business Finance: Bred Tough: The Best-of-Breed, 2009 (July 2009)
• Defining success through strategic planning and priority goal setting
• The Balanced Scorecard
• Organizational Performance Management