I have been persuaded, much against my better judgement to get involved with some benchmarking, not once but twice. The results are in and interestingly they are contradictory. (One says that we do too much of something whilst the other says that we don’t do enough of it but that’s a tale for perhaps another time.)
Providing the information was in itself quite a challenge as many of the questions were difficult to comprehend and very easy to misinterpretation. We attached some qualifying detail to make it easier to understand what we meant by the numbers but I’m not sure that this was taken into account. Some of the data required was not recorded by us in the same format, in the main because it was not relevant to the business we were trying to drive and so there was quite a lot of back tracking and reformatting of indicators.
In the end I’ve concentred more on only one of the benchmarking clubs however as they presented the information in nice bar graphs and even traffic lights to show relative performance, or so they say. The results are as expected with some good, or upper quartile and represented by green lights, some so-so with amber lights and of course some bad or lower quartile which of course are associated with glaring red lights.
And now I am in the results phase and have started using the internationally recognised rules of benchmarking to go through the information which are as follows:
- Anything with green lights must be correct as it shows us in a good light and so I won’t bother with any further analysis,
- For anything with an amber light I have dug out a plan or a strategy to show that improvements are already in hand and so by next year things will be much better,
- And of course for red lights I have started to argue about what the numbers mean and resubmit some revised data which presents us (literally) in a better light.
Everyone does this and this is why benchmarking is of no real relevance. If you are good you back off and if you are bad then you argue that they mustn’t be comparing apples with apples. There are also results that I am unable to get my head around such as relative cost as a percentage of overall spend by the organisation. We are somewhere in the middle but please tell me, is it better to spend more as a percentage of turnover or less? Is a cheaper service better or worse? Only the individual organisation can make such a choice and determine the type of business that it wants to be.
What is the real point of comparing your data with some one else’s as their circumstances have to be peculiar to their organisation and could be totally different form yours? An organisation with multiple locations, for example, cannot be compared to one with a single head office or one in an urban area cannot be compared to one in a more rural setting.
Oh dear, I have never been a fan of benchmarking and was determined not to be the kind of person who got involved in such things but I have and so I am. I’m afraid I’m beginning to hate myself.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 