How to get started on a benchmarking exercise

Product Description

The benefits of benchmarking include:

• The best practice is often not in articles and books as these lag a few years behind.
• A benchmarking project offers a great ‘time out’ from the hustle and bustle of your career.
• You will have created a valuable adjunct to your network of contacts and may well have sown the seeds for a future lucrative career move.
• It is a fantastic personal learning opportunity.

This benchmarking toolkit is targeted at those who:

1. have been charged with the responsibility to find out more about their sector
2. want to further their career while benefiting their organisation
3. consultancies who want to offer benchmarking services.

Target audience for this toolkit

This toolkit is targeted at those who:

1. have been charged with the responsibility to find out more about their sector
2. want to further their career while benefiting their organisation
3. consultancies who want to offer benchmarking services.

 What is covered in David Parmenter’s benchmarking toolkit

Guidelines, rules, and one page E-templates to get your benchmarking over the line.  The contents include

1 Background. 4

1.1.       Target audience for this toolkit 4

1.2.       Why does benchmarking work so well? 4

1.3.       The benefits of benchmarking to your organisation and yourself 4

1.4.       Benchmarking is not the end result it is the beginning. 4

1.5.       The purpose of benchmarking. 4

2 Basics of benchmarking. 5

2.1.       The key steps you will need to take. 5

2.2.       Achieving a common understanding of the assignment 5

2.3.       Planning your research. 5

2.4.       Interviewing techniques so you unearth the ‘gold’ 5

2.5.       Hold a focus group workshop attended by the organisation’s oracles 9

2.6.       Selling the process through the organisation’s oracles 9

2.7.       Plan the roll-out with the oracles help. 10

2.8.       Designing and delivering a bulletproof ‘Sales pitch’ 10

2.9.       The roll-out of the new processes 12

3. Selling the change –using. 14

3.1.       Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan: why so many initiatives fail 14

3.2.       Harry Mills: the importance of self-persuasion. 15

3.3.       John Kotter: how to lead change successfully. 15

3.4.       Selling the need to benchmark to the C-suite. 17

3.5.       Learn to sell by using the emotional drivers of the buyer 17

3.6.       The elevator speech. 18

3.7.       Pre-selling to an influential member of the decision team.. 18

4  Before you introduce new measures understand what KPIs are. 20

4.1.       An introduction to the new thinking on KPIs 20

4.2.       Performance measures fit into two groups 20

5 Writer’s biography. 26

Appendix 1: Delivering compelling PowerPoint presentations 27

Appendix 2 :Utilise data visualisation best practice. 34

Appendix 3: Writing a report that encourages action. 39

 To access David Parmenter’s benchmarking toolkit