Customer Reviews

Analysis for Improving Performance: Tools for Diagnosing Organizations and Documenting Workplace Expertise

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I thought this was a wonderful book. The principles explained here regarding how to improve your company's performance (or any company for that matter) are universal. Instead of writing about how to run a company better the author could have been talking about how to master butterfly, breast stroke, back stroke, and freestyle as a swimmer. Or he could have been talking about how to improve one's game as a golfer. But this book is about how to figure out what your company is doing now, how it can do things better in the future, and how to change the current ways to better future ways.

The "Performance Improvement Model" (PIM) involves the following five steps:

1. Analyze
2. Design
3. Develop
4. Implement
5. Evaluate
6. Start Over at Step 1

And the author applies the PIM at the following levels in a business:

1. Organizational
2. Process
3. Team
4. Worker

What is covered in this book is what an entrepreneur must consider when writing a business plan and later when implementing it. It is also what an established business owner must do in order to grow her business and remain competitive in her market and industry. Some might call it a strategic planning book.

There were loads of helpful figures to examine while reading this book. And I liked that. I also liked the "conclusions" included at the end of each chapter that made it easier for me to grasp what the book was about when I did my first skim of it.

The book is a second edition. I have not read the first edition, but the two reviews ahead of me for this book apply to the first edition. The book I am reviewing was written in 2007 and I highly recommend it to anyone who is putting together a business plan or doing strategic planning for a small business. 5 stars!

Hats off to author Richard A. Swanson for writing clearly, interestingly and compellingly on the subject of creating effective programs to improve workplace performance. He champions approaching this task with up-front analysis based on systems theory. Since he criticizes ordinary management for not understanding this problem and for not knowing the methods that can be used to resolve it, we [...] recommend this book not only to Human Resources professionals, but also to managers and executives in all industries. If you want employee performance to improve, upgrade your understanding of how to make it so.

I would like to thank Richard A. Swanson for such a useful and insightful organization development resource. Each chapter has allowed me to see the gaps in my own proposals and will assist me in improving my organizational proposals. I appreciate the depth of information of the assessment and analysis phase of performance improvement and its foundational frames and theories.

Swanson has a long history working with organizations and as a academician regarding this text's topic. He writes well; explaining his theories so that they are easily grasped--even if one doesn't always agree with them.

I am not sure this would be a bedtime read, but for a student who wants some basis for either OD or training and development, this is a good place to start.

"Analysis for Improving Performance" won the book-of-the-year awards from both the International Society for Performance Improvement and the Society for Human Resource Management.