Bespoke Benchmarking Service

In these challenging economic times, organisations are naturally ever more cautious about the inherent costs of commissioning expensive consultancy projects, particularly when often there are solutions are available much closer to home.  This is where our Bespoke Benchmarking Service comes into its own, liberating knowledge and ideas through a flexible process of measuring, comparing, understanding current practices, learning how others are doing things, and ultimately, coming up with fresh, enhanced ways of doing things.    

Whether you are looking to develop an internal organisational benchmarking activity to share best practices, or perhaps you are looking to compare and learn from external organisations, we have the know how and flexibility to support you every step of the way. 

Before doing anything else though, our approach is always to start with the end firmly in mind.  This means building a clear picture of what you are looking to achieve and what your specific goals for the exercise are.  Once these have been firmly established, a typical project might include:

• Source suitable partners to benchmark with
• Agree unambiguous rules of engagement to protect anonymity and security of information, so eliminating potential concerns about commercial sensitivities
• Develop and agree a detailed plan of action to capture what will be included in the project, the aspirations of all parties, SMART goals, methodology to be used, milestones and outcomes
• Preliminary research into the structure of and measures to be included in the benchmarking instrument
• Workshop to refine and finalise this benchmarking tool
• Undertake the data collection through using the means agreed
• Create anonymised performance benchmark reports using our international Benchmarkindex® engine
• Analyse and interpret the findings
• Review these to agree the key priority areas for further development and an action plan for achieving this
• Arrange further meetings with benchmarking partners to enrich knowledge of practices being used
• Source relevant information from other sources to assist the action planning service
• Regular reviews on progress with the plan and support provided where required
• If appropriate, further benchmarking exercises to support continuous improvement

The structure outlined gives some idea of how the exercise might work, but is by no means the only approach.  Contact us to discuss your requirements further and we will be delighted to develop ideas with you on a no obligation basis.