Performance technology as a means to improve organizational and individual performance is often shroud in complex language, rarefied theory, and bewildering applications. Several excellent publications either elucidate Performance Technology’s whys and whats or make clear its many hows, but few adequately and comprehensively clarify both.
Authors Darlene Van Tiem of University of Michigan, James Moseley of Wayne State University, and Joan Conway Dessinger of the Lake Group have recently developed the second edition of Fundamentals of Performance Technology: A Guide to Improving People, Process, and Performance. This guidebook broadly explains performance technology as an established, systematic, and reproducible method of improving organizational and individual performance (the HPT Model). It also provides applications of performance technology at work in a variety of environments, and proffers dozens of performance tools to help the reader improve his or her own performance technology practice.
So what is Performance Technology? According to the authors, performance technology is the systematic process of linking business goals and strategies with the workforce responsible for achieving goals. Moreover, performance technology practitioners study and design processes that bring about increased performance in the workplace using a common methodology to understand, inspire, and improve. And, finally, performance technology systematically analyzes performance problems and their underlying causes and describes exemplary performance and success indicators.
Van Tiem et al have authored a guidebook that makes performance technology understandable and achievable by assembling an easy-to-read, easy-to-apply, and comprehensive explanation of the factors affecting workplace behavior and using a commonsense approach and consistent structure.
In Fundamentals of Performance Technology, the authors offer a brief overview of each major component of the HPT Model, its theoretical underpinnings, and major thinkers, covering:
diagnosing workplace situations
identifying causes
selecting doable, adequate interventions
implementing changes, and
evaluating results
In addition, each of these sections is complemented by:
Illustrative real-life Case Studies showing practical applications from a variety of workplace environments; and
Job Aids -- or performance support tools -- to help the reader bring about real workplace performance improvement. Fully indexed and featuring a glossary of performance technology terms, an extensive bibliography and selected readings, and dozens of reproducible performance tools, Fundamentals of Performance Technology not only simplifies the practice of Performance Technology, it shows you how it has worked and how to do it.
The Second Edition contains two new appendices that describe the ISPI developed Standards of Performance of Technology and map the content of Fundamentals of Performance Technology and Performance Improvement Interventions to those Standards.
