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Management Performance Benchmarks
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Management Performance Benchmarks
Publication date: 12/07
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Executive summary
Browse the shelves of any well-stocked bookstore and you'll find
dozens of books that promise to identify the one or two essential
qualities of great managers, from the clock-watching skills of
the legendary One-Minute Manager to the take-no-hostages approach
of Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun. Incentive plans often
send equally confusing messages: We know of one large software
company (long since swallowed up by a competitor) that awarded
bonuses based on no less than 17 individually-weighted and
conflicting performance metrics. With so many misaligned notions
of "good management performance," it’s not surprising that many
managers feel clueless about which goals and priorities they
should most actively pursue.
The message is even more bewildering for the people who manage
support operations. In many companies, their departments have
become major profit centers, but top management keeps insisting
on the primacy of cost-cutting efforts. Invest in building a
loyal installed base, they’re told, but also see if you can
squeeze more dollars into next quarter’s revenue report. And if
a manager does turn support and services turn into a high-growth
cash cow, chances are the CEO will drop by and warn that "Wall
Street doesn’t like companies with too much services income."
To be sure, sorting out conflicting priorities is something
managers are supposed to do well (on top of everything else
they’re supposed to do well), and certainly not all companies
have the same goals. But we thought it might be helpful to look
for a consensus view about what managers feel are the critical
performance measures and priorities for their jobs. We surveyed
136 support and service managers from a broad range of software
and technology companies, asking them to measure two
variables—
their "perception of the level of importance"
that their company assigns
to each of ten aspects of
management performance, and
their "personal effectiveness" in each of these
areas.
This report identifies and ranks these ten areas in terms of
their relative importance to senior management, and compares
the average "effectiveness" score for each one. As part of the
analysis, the report identifies the gap between effectiveness
and importance, and also breaks out the response data by level
of authority (VP/Director vs. Manager/Supervisor) and support
organization size.
Copies of the survey are free to ASP members in the
members-only area.
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