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August 11, 2005

Performance from Knowledge-based Quality

Readings and conversations frequently put the question in mind, "what is the difference between managing performance, quality and knowledge?"

Described specifically in the context of a business:

- Performance management provides a practice and methodology for ensuring operational alignment to business requirements.

- Quality management provides a practice and methodology for ensuring production compliance to product requirements.

- Knowledge management provides a practice and methodology for ensuring concept relevance to process requirements.

In all three cases there is an issue of usage (using operations, using production, using concepts).
Likewise, all three are associated with some kind of mandatory success threshold (alignment, compliance, relevance).

But their distinctions are critical.

- Performance is focused on organizational design and purpose. (business requirements)

- Quality is focused on customer expectations and demands. (product requirements)

- Knowledge is focused on role-specific competency. (process requirements)

These distinctions are "sweet spots", not mutual exclusions or boundaries. But their relationship to each other has a typical pattern: generally, the business should assume that knowledge will drive quality to a level where desired performance is enabled.

Specifically, concepts inform the production underlying business operations. But each of those three elements can change at any time; and therefore, their relationship -- as practiced by the business -- merits continual re-evaluation and pertinent tuning.

Meanwhile, each respective case (performance, quality, knowledge) has a management process associated with it that has the goal of improving the state of that case. Thus, to improve its own effectiveness in that responsibility, each management process itself becomes subject to better knowledge, quality and performance.

For example, the Performance Management Process itself should evolve with attention to its associated knowledge, quality and performance.

This shows that as a set of abstracted competencies, the pursuits of knowledge, quality and performance can be applied at many scales in the business, from the task level to the project/process or finally the enterprise level. Consider these examples:

- At any given time or place in the life of the organization, there might be a focus on the "performance" of the Knowledge Management practice, while Knowledge Management is under pressure to help improve business production's Quality.

- Or there might be a focus on "quality" within (that is, the quality of) Performance Management, while business operational Performance overall is additionally being supported by business production's Quality Management effort.

And so forth...

The business needs to identify these various more specific emphases and determine whether or how they are complementary (or at least mutually benign) rather than competing.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at August 11, 2005 10:55 AM

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