You may have never thought of it like this before, but to make your work or company a success you will need to address the three Ps, performance, planning and profit. Let’s take a minute to demonstrate why.
Performance, the first “P”
You are part of a team, no matter how small. The success of the team depends upon everyone carrying their own weight. If the person assigned to the graphic user interface is way behind the rest of the team, the team is inefficient and perhaps at worse, the project fails.
Measuring performance in this time of hybrid teams is not at all easy. There are tools to measure performance by individual and team (my favorite being CoAmplifi from Curaesoft). To be effective, each person on the team must enter daily their time spent upon the project assigned to that person. Properly managed, this can also feed timecard systems as well as performance measurement. A performance progress bar would measure the individual’s progress toward job completion and would be an important part of the group’s combined progress bar.
Planning, the second “P”
[Email readers, continue here…] This one starts at the top of the organization (perhaps you!) with the goal or objective set by senior management, strategies to achieve the goal, and tactics needed to achieve each strategy. You may immediately recall this as the OST method of strategic planning, and you’d be right. Senior management sets the tone for the rest of the company with a clear objective (such as “achieve $20 million in revenue per year within four years.) The OST plan calls for corporate strategies to achieve that goal, usually addressing each major department. Consider “Release the new software by December 31st” or “Achieve profitability by end of year two” or “Increase departmental efficiency to 80% of maximum potential.” Then – in concert with department managers – the tactics are planned at a high level or left to departments to list and implement.
To complete the OST planning steps, each department head creates their own OST plan in support of the company’s OST plan. Development would take the December 31st deadline and break it into processes and interim deadlines. Sales would create metrics to track each salesperson’s progress and success. Finance would develop measures (KPIs) to watch over and correct financial strategies.
Profit, the third “P”
If every person in every department did the things required of them in the performance and tactical measurement above, then the entire company would achieve the objective set out by senior management. Any people or departments short of their performance goal would jeopardize the company’s achievement of the goal and reduce profit of that department and the company.
Well thought out and well executed, a company’s chance of success is greatly increased. Risks are reduced, and all teams can celebrate.
Performance, planning and profit!
Photos created with MS Designer-AI (DALL-e) for this blog using prompt: “A realistic image of a young group of managers informally dressed around a table examining a document labeled “performance, planning and profitability. Six point white around image.”
Dave — An ancilary thought to your excellent article on the 3-P’s. As far as the Planning segment is concerned, I like to focus on P to the 7th Power:
Perfect, Prior, Planning, Prevents, Pathetically, Poor, Perfomance!