Some previous students have declared in their posts that large companies such as Xerox, AT & T & BBC are strongly considering utilizing benchmarking to improve their operations it certainly lends credence to looking hard at the approach in other businesses.
I have often seen one of the most important steps, identifying the best practices in the data, ignored altogether in many situations. It seems fairly wasteful to go through all of the steps to drive process improvement and leave out one of the most important steps in the process that transfers learning for future projects.
I have worked on quite a few project teams where we were implementing next benchmarking metrics and applying it to a process to help drive improvement. On only one occasion did we perform a solid post mortem on the project where we brought the entire project team in to identify what the best practices were so we could leverage those learning on current and future projects. Have you ever participated in a benchmarking improvement project where best practices were identified and leveraged?
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Reference/Citation: Harvard Style