SteveJ-restore-test

Quality is predicated on Caring . High Performance, also called "Excellence",  first requires people to Care about their results. They are related through the Feedback Loop of Continuous Improvement, also known as O-O-D-A (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) and Plan-Do-Check-Act (from W. Edwards Deming ). The Military take OODA another level with After-Action-Reviews or After-Action-Reports (AAR's), a structured approach to acquiring "Lessons Learned". High Performance has two aspects: work-rate and consistency . It's not enough to produce identical/consistent goods or results everytime, but you have to do it with speed . There's an inviolate Quality Dictum: You can't Check your own work . For Organisations, this Dictum becomes:  Objective assessment requires an Independent Expert Body. From which follows the necessity for an External Auditor:   Only Independent persons/bodies can check an Organisation and its people/processes for compliance and pe...

Is there any reason the "Public Service", as we call paid Government Administration in Australia, isn't the benchmark for good Management and Governance?? Summary : This piece proposes 5 simple metrics that reflect, but are not in themselves pay or performance measures for, management effectiveness and competence: Meeting efficiency and effectiveness, Time Planning/Use and Task Prioritisation, Typing Speed, Tool/I.T. Competence: speed and skill in basic PC, Office Tools and Internet tools and tasks, and E-mail use (sent, read, completed, in-progress, pending, never resolved, personal, social, other). As a taxpayer, in a world of White Collar Desktop Automation, I'd expect some quantitative metrics for "efficiency" and "effectiveness" as required of Agency heads in s44 of the FMAA (Financial Management and Accountability Act, 1997), not just some hand-waving, bland reassurance by those Heads and the Audit Office that "we're World'...