Performance Support For Performance
Although performance support has been in discussions, many proposals for performance support solutions continue to stay on drawing boards due to their inability to persuade the budget managers. Ever wondered about structured insights into creating a persuasive business case for performance leaders that can win the desired funding from their finance counterparts? Performance leaders and budget managers often conceive performance support as a learning tool or intervention.
To be able to achieve expected business growth, business leaders now have to be more focused on increasing productivity. Unlike traditionally, business leaders will now have to take charge of evaluating and making informed decisions in investing in performance support solutions. Performance leaders first need to understand the critical differentiation between learning and performance support solutions. The goal of elearning or learning interventions is learning and the objective of performance support solutions is performance.
There are various intrinsic issues, performance practitioners are never aware of, such as analyzing performance problems, component costs for a performance project (example: designing costs, software costs, training expenses, etc.), alternatives, selection between cost avoidance and ROI. Another critical problem that is often missed out is analyzing the need of dynamic performance support solutions versus proprietary solutions. From a short-term perspective, proprietary performance support solutions can be realistic whereas dynamic/ adaptive performance support solutions can continuously enhance performance as business factors change in long term. Performance leaders and designers need to focus on prioritizing between the two.
Technology environments, organizational readiness and change management are other issues also need attention. If all these issues can be evaluated effectively, planning and budgeting for performance support solutions can become very persuasive for performance leaders and 'tactile' for budget managers.
Training and development departments have to win the attention of IT departments to create a joint task force that would facilitate the evaluation and implementation of performance support solutions. IT executives need to be convinced of their importance in helping training executives develop, propose and achieve budget approvals for performance support.
While the ultimate goal of performance support solutions is to improve business performance, it requires knowledge acquisition, knowledge management, integration with learning or training delivery systems. There is a higher role of enterprise document management systems, collaborative work-spaces and most importantly performance-centered collaborative learning platforms in establishing a dynamic, yet performance-centered performance support solution.
The key perspective is to bridge performance support solutions with learning and training technologies to help organizational performance support practitioners achieve targeted employee performance results.
