Benchmarking

Benchmarking is about learning from others to help identify development or performance improvement priorities. By means of comparing policies, processes or other elements, it is an aid to improved understanding about performance, so you can ask better questions and create more focused developmental goal.

Organisations are increasingly keen to learn how others do things, particularly how the best in their sector is doing. Better still, some organisations are ignoring sector boundaries and seeking to compare their performance, costs and processes with the best in class, wherever it’s to be found.

Clients Approach Us To

Position a particular aspect of their work against peers or best in class.
Lend data and evidence to their instincts about a particular challenge.
To make a case for change based on facts.
To provide evidence of the good practice currently being used.
To pinpoint particular changes that may be needed.
Review an aspect of work in advance of potential major change

Our benchmarking service works by recruiting a number of organisations that agree to share like-for-like data on a confidential basis. It helps to have an independent party to ensure confidentiality, to ensure clean data, and to ensure a confidential approach to data management.

Our benchmarking work is typically one of two kinds:

Single client benchmarking to research and gain evidence to support the findings in a particular area.
A sector-wide/open benchmarking service using a ‘club’ or subscription process.

One of our best-known open benchmarking interventions is BoardsCount™ which will focus when this service is online on benchmarking governance practices.

“We want to add weight and further evidence to the governance review you’re carrying out with us. Can you benchmark what we do with other similar organisations – and other high profile organisations outside of our sector?”.

In brief we:

Researched the key areas to compare.
Got in touch with a range of comparable organisations that fit our client’s criteria.
Sought their agreement to compare the areas in a way that gave all participants value
Collected the data, analysed it and presented it confidentially to all parties.

“John Tierney of Transform Management Consultancy undertook a review of the performance of our governing Council in 2012. By interviewing Trustees, Senior Team and School Governors, and by benchmarking with other organisations, he built up a picture of how our Council works together, what works well and what could be improved. We put together an action plan based on the recommendations of the Review and are busy implementing them. The friendly and open approach from John made the exercise easy and enjoyable, while still producing some firm pointers for further work”.

Lucie Dutton, Head of Governance, GDST