Best Practices in Planning and Performance Management: Radically Rethinking Management for a Volatile World, Third Edition

Introduction

There is no doubt that that we live in the Information Age. A typical weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England. Consider how the average manager feels when asked to develop plans, build budgets, report progress, and make decisions in response to today's increasingly competitive, fast-paced, and volatile environment. Traditional planning and management reporting processes are simply too slow, too detailed, and too disconnected for today's competitive world. Managers are seeking new decision-making processes and tools that will enable them to shorten the cycle time to make and implement a decision.

This book summarizes the current state of the art with respect to best practices for business performance management or performance management, as I shall refer to the topic going forward. Best practices have been the subject of much discussion in recent years, and a growing body of knowledge has emerged that purports to define best practices and quantify their value to an organization. A lot of anecdotal evidence links best practice application to improved performance. This book seeks to establish a framework for identifying and implementing best practices in performance management.

The underpinning of the research and analysis contained in this book is my work over the last 25 years with over 250 different companies: first as a consultant with Deloitte and A.T. ...