|
Best
practice is the best possible way of working today to achieve your business
objectives. Effective identification and transfer of best practice can
boost a company's bottom line by 20%. Best Practice Transfer initiatives are
powerful tools for leadership management training and employee training
programs as performance objectives are both accountable and
quantifiable.
Even if your business is successful today,
it does not mean you are using best practice, and if your main competitor
is, be prepared for a rocky ride. What works today may not work tomorrow,
and if you are using yesterday’s best practice because it’s always
worked before – you may well be following the path of the dinosaur.
Best practice occurs in a leadership
culture as a response to change, and has a limited shelf life. As long as
change keeps occurring, the best practice solution you worked so hard to
find will itself become redundant worst practice. Identifying and
transferring best practice is the biggest challenge facing the Human
Resource community in today’s fast changing world as, traditionally, the
strategic application of training has been perceived as a one-way competency
disseminating street. A best practice strategy changes this one-way approach
to Learning and Development to a two-way pro-active function as the
identification and gathering of best practice is given the same value as
deployment of solutions. Within this gathering function, traditional
management structures are not just motivated to buy-in to initiatives, but
also are empowered by getting part ownership of the design and development
of solutions that are relevant to their needs. Similarly, initiative at the
front line is encouraged and rewarded to overcome the tendency to
"hide" best practice "secrets", and identified
opportunities and constraints have a channel for best practice input with
tangible outcomes. Identified best practices, be they from existing
management experience; innovative front line solutions or from performances
from your competitors become a dynamic competency framework (or more
accurately center of excellent solutions) from which each manager can select
relevant training modules to target not only the maximum performance of each
individual subordinate, but also the manager's own ongoing leadership
management training.
When you find someone in your company who
has found a solution to a problem, or someone who is performing better than
the benchmark norm (an "Accomplished" or "Exemplar"
performer), you have identified new best practice. The biggest problem with
identifying best practice is that it then poses the problem "How do I
let everyone know about this?" That is exactly what Best Practice
Transfer Ltd. is about. We have developed multimedia
authoring courseware
that allows any of your trainers to develop computer based multimedia
training interventions without programming knowledge or complicated
flow-charts, and to have those interventions available for deployment the
same day. As our training software is module-based, each
module becomes by default a competency in its own right and can be used
to develop and grow your competency mapping capability. In effect, the
library of training modules you store for assembly into training
interventions is a dynamic competency framework
that overcomes the problems associated with keeping competency mapping up to
date by naturally updating your competency framework every time you discover
a better way of doing things.
Most
companies need look no further than their own doorstep to find and
capitalize on best practice. It occurs regularly somewhere in all
organizations in three forms:
1. Performance exceptions
2. Procedure exceptions
3.
Corporate
Initiatives. (Potential
best practice)
A
well thought out best practice transfer system helps a company achieve 4
critical strategic objectives:
1.
Driving performance improvements and continuous development improvements.
2.
Accelerating the development of a company into a learning organization.
3.
Implementing performance management systems that increase change-reaction
capabilities.
4.
Growing training cost centers
into initiative-focused learning &
development profit centers.
Best
Practice Transfer capitalizes on the
unrealized experiential and
innovational value already existent in a company. Opportunities to leverage
this investment through best practice transfer exist in every commercial
sector, across all sizes of companies, and at all levels of a company.
The
ability to transfer best practice is essential in any situation where change
is occurring. It becomes critical when that change is occurring rapidly as
it mitigates the unpredictable investment contingency risks associated with
developing new operating processes. Reinventing the wheel is both expensive
and pointless when you've already done it, and especially so if you have a
working model sitting in your intellectual warehouse.
Most
companies are familiar with the concept of CRM and Data Mining. Best
Practice Transfer is a catalytic step in setting up a KRM and Knowledge
Mining capability. The Best Practice Transfer Ltd. course development system
is strategically designed to address the opportunity to develop dynamic
competency frameworks. The course development system focuses on designing
and developing competency MODULES and placing these modules in a library for
assembly into training courses when needed. This library essentially becomes
a tangible dynamic competency framework for a company, and modules are
withdrawn and assembled into courses to address performance improvements,
closing capability gaps and assembling induction courses. The greatest
advantage of this modular course development strategy is that individual
training courses can be assembled for individual employees at the click of a
button. Similarly, individual training courses can be assembled for
individual situations. Whenever a best practice is discovered, the
competencies inherent in that best practice can be immediately added
to the company competency framework, and a new MODULE can be quickly made
in-house for assembly in future training interventions. It is now completely
feasible to deploy a training course this week, and based on results, refine
the course and re-deploy next week to change the outcomes and automatically
update the company competency framework.
Go
to Top
What
is Best Practice?
In essence, best
practice is any ethical performance that produces an improved
outcome. It occurs from the top to the front-line in your, and your
competitor's company. It is an
exceptional (out of the norm) solution developed through experience,
initiative or innovation, and is invariably produced in response to the
"What if..." questioning capability that identifies an existing employee for inclusion in your talent management
program or a competitor's talented employee who should be attracted into
your talent pool. Best practice is
dynamic as it is a reactive solution response to change, but is also
critically time-sensitive when change continues. The Best Practice Transfer
Ltd. course development system was designed with these critical
time-sensitive criteria in mind. As best practice transfer needs to occur
during the time frame of solution relevance, our course development system
is designed for use by any trainer in your company to produce best practice
training modules in about an hour for inclusion in your dynamic competency
framework.
Go
to Top
How
do I identify Best Practice?
In
a leadership focused organization, best practice occurs naturally and can be
identified through performance management in three areas as a response to
operational initiative and innovation. It occurs as a singular exceptional
outcome from individuals (individual best practice) or as an exceptional outcome
from a particular group. (management best practice) While it is tempting to just
focus on performance exceptions, it is equally important to focus on
operation procedure exceptions as they often demonstrate redundant best
practice procedure that is currently causing performance constraint or
preventing successful implementation of change. The third area for
identification of potential best practice occurs during the flexing of
organizational capability by corporate change initiatives. Experiential and
innovational solutions generated as a response to change become potential
new best practice (team best practice) that can be translated into dynamic competency frameworks
for use across the whole organization. Outlined below are a few examples of
best practice capture for each of these 3 areas:
Best Practice Performance exceptions.
Best
practice performance exceptions are identified by quantitative analysis and
address tangible outcomes. A customer representative outselling colleagues;
a reduction in customer complaints or production increases are obvious
examples. Essentially they are produced by a localized increase in
competency involving human resource and/or system resource, and the return
on investment of transferring this new competency peer-to-peer or operating
unit-to-operating unit can be substantial as new outcomes have a measurable
and immediate bottom-line effect.
Best Practice Procedure exceptions.
Best
practice procedure exceptions can be both qualitative and quantitative, and
address a systemic improvement in the way to do things or support
achievement. Higher employee retention rates than the norm; a better
health and safety record; a culture of engagement and accountability and the use of out of procedure but acceptable shortcuts are
examples. Essentially they are procedural efficiencies that promote
operational efficiency and can produce both short and medium term ROI or
savings.
Corporate Initiatives.
Corporate
initiatives always require a quantitative measurement to differentiate a
"feel-good" strategic initiative from a results-focused
initiative, as the quantitative evaluation of results introduces the
performance and accountability criteria essential to determine both the
operational capability to succeed, and the real value of the initiative to
the organization. It also allows for speedy re-focusing of an initiative if
unexpected results occur or best practice is discovered provided a fast
competency re-training system is in place. A 50% growth in sales revenue
over the next 3-years; an improvement in customer satisfaction to 92%; a new
product launch program; a decrease in health and safety incidents and the
elimination of all discrimination and diversity legal actions are examples
of corporate initiatives that produce best practice. Essentially initiatives
produce opportunities for both performance and procedure best practice to
occur at a tactical level, and the capture and speedy dissemination of this
best practice both enhances the probability of initiative success and
reduces the capital investment in the change.
Go
to Top
Transferring best
practice - E-learning or your existing Network?
In
the rush to introduce e-learning as the 'latest, greatest innovation' many
companies are buying expensively into the concept that e-learning has
superseded intranet learning and are discarding an existing capitalized
resource that can still produce a major return on investment. The two
delivery methodologies are not competitive, but are complementary. Each has
strengths and weaknesses, and each has a place in a whole-company learning
and development environment.
The
strategic imperative for adopting Internet learning is that it enables a
capability to deliver training anywhere in the world from a single dedicated
deployment system. At first glance, this appears to be the answer to all
distance learning problems -
and it is for major training projects. However,
E learning has two significant weaknesses. Firstly, as the Internet server
is remote from the company intranet server, all learning management data
capture occurs on the Internet server while the data analysis invariably
occurs on the intranet server. If the two servers are co-located, the
problem is small. If the learning deployment Internet server is located for
example in the US and the course content is for the UK, then the problem is
greater as the individual performance and coaching analysis data for the UK
employees is located on the US server. Secondly, Internet deployment is
inefficient for unique targeted regional initiatives and solutions. In a
situation of regionalized change where solution development is a work in
progress, the local solution developer needs instant access to the training
intervention so that it can be modified in real time against the local
results.
The
strategic imperative for adopting intranet learning is that no investment is
required as the network facility already exists, and the use of the network
drives a further return on investment for the capitalized system. However,
intranet learning has two inherent weaknesses. Firstly, training can only be
deployed to computers already connected to the company network. This is
often not a significant problem, as it is rare that training needs to be
delivered to a computer that is not networked, but is connected to the
internet. Secondly, bandwidth is a network issue. There are times when a
company intranet is very busy, and many people running training programs
over the network would use so much bandwidth that the speed of usage for
other users would be degraded. Use of the intranet for training requires
either an extra scheduling effort to balance the use of bandwidth, or the
download in off-peak times of any data heavy components to local client
computers. The obvious advantage of network delivered training is that
training courses can be adjusted in real time for each individual user based
on the individuals' interaction, and results are instantly available for
management review.
In
essence, both deployment systems have their place in a best practice whole-business
leadership focused learning and development strategy. It is just a case of choosing the
appropriate system for each training intervention.
Go
to Top
| 
