Perhaps the most difficult aspect of organizational operations is making accurate appraisals of work systems in search of cost-effective changes that will improve performance. The complex nature of work systems—particularly the more emergent knowledge and service work systems—makes it very difficult to clearly distinguish the impact of individual design variables and to link their contributions to current performance. The readily apparent contributing factors to which performance shortfalls are frequently blamed are, generally speaking, only visible signs of the real driving forces that yield the results.

To be effective at making organizational appraisals, practitioners need to detect and understand the forces that drive performance. Adding to the challenge, no two organizations are the same, and there is no set standard to which organizations can be compared. Therefore this challenge is best met with the open mind and objectivity of an external professional.

Initiatives to appraise organizational operations, whether audit (externally directed) or assessment (internally directed), should contain three basic steps.

• The first, issue identification, provides initial focus for the appraisal process, utilizing heuristic scanning and appraisal frameworks to highlight the principal issues that are likely constraints to work-system performance.
• The second step, factor appraisal, organizes these issues into factors, or categories of issues, in order to identify their source and to surmise their relative impact (using inferential statistics whenever possible).
• The third step, work-system illustration, depicts these factors and visually demonstrates their interrelated impact on work-system performance.

For major organizational operations, assessments predictably reveal immediate opportunities for improvements, often substantial ones. This is not a universal criticism. Rather, this experience is explained by the fact that natural systems are open and emergent and undergo change continuously. As a result, the effectiveness of natural systems can almost always be improved, and the accurate determination of the precise method for improvement can be detected only by objective appraisal.

What would it mean to you if substantial opportunities for improvement that could be easily achieved were identified in your business operations? We can make it happen.

Contact pepitoneworldwide today at information@pepitone.com and tell us how we can support your work.

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