رویکرد یکپارچه برای ارزیابی و برنامه ریزی از طریق بهترین شیوه ها

This paper develops a new integrated evaluation and planning approach for implementing a given set of best practices in a prioritized and phased manner. The best practices are implemented for achieving lower-level business unit objectives and higher-level strategic goals of an organization. With a multiattribute decision making algorithm under the balanced scorecard (BSC) framework, a new evaluation model is developed to effectively measure the relationship between lower-level objectives and higher-level goals, and to give each best practice a relative priority value. A new adjustment method is also developed to address potential biases in the self-assessment process at the business unit level. The evaluation model enables the prioritization and implementation planning of best practices in terms of their importance and achievability from the viewpoints of the organization, four BSC strategic perspectives, individual business units, and the overall implementation planning zone. An empirical study is conducted to demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the integrated evaluation and planning approach.

Best practices have been widely implemented in an organization as a technique, method, process, activity, or mechanism in order to optimize the result of production or management practices and to minimize the possibility of mistakes. As a business buzzword, best practices are commonly used to describe the most efficient and effective way of accomplishing a task or achieving a goal [1]. The importance of adopting best practices has been well recognized in practice. With limited resources available, it is of strategic importance for an organization to evaluate the best practices to be implemented for effective management of their implementation in a prioritized and phased manner. From the organizational perspective, the best practices to be implemented usually have different degrees of importance (or potential contribution) to the global strategic goals of the organization, on which the evaluation of best practices should be based. To implement best practices for achieving its global strategic goals, the organization requires a group of strategic or operational business units to work together. Under the current operational settings and resource availability, the best practices often have different levels of achievability when being implemented at the corresponding business units. Thus, the evaluation of best practices should also consider their achievability as it will affect their contribution to the global strategic goals. As such, best practices should be implemented in a prioritized manner according to their relative importance and achievability. However, how to effectively prioritize a given set of best practices and strategically plan their implementation for achieving the global strategic goals of the organization remains an open issue. This issue is complicated by the fact that the best practices are performed at the corresponding business units essentially for achieving their own local operational objectives, while being evaluated in terms of their contribution to the higher-level global strategic goals of the organization. To ensure effective implementation of best practices at individual business units for achieving the organization’s global strategic goals, it is desirable to plan their implementation in a phased manner from the perspectives of both the organization and individual business units. To address this issue of strategic importance for an organization, we develop a new integrated evaluation and planning approach. The approach integrates the balanced scorecard (BSC) framework and multiattribute decision making (MADM) technique to evaluate the contribution of best practices. The BSC has been widely implemented by organizations as a performance management and measurement tool [2]. MADM has been widely used to evaluate a finite set of decision alternatives with respect to a set of evaluation criteria [3], [4] and [5]. In addition, the approach integrates higher-level organization goals and lower-level business unit objectives as the evaluation criteria to evaluate the contribution of best practices. The approach also integrates the viewpoints of the organization, the BSC strategic perspectives and individual business units to plan the phased implementation of best practices. In subsequent sections, we first present the BSC-based MADM evaluation framework with discussions on best practices, the BSC-based framework and the MADM evaluation. Next, we develop a new evaluation model that integrates the BSC and MADM for solving the general best practice evaluation problem. We then develop a new implementation planning process for facilitating the phased implementation of best practices based on the evaluation result. Finally, we conduct an empirical study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the integrated approach for the prioritization and planning of a large set of best practices.

It is of strategic importance for an organization to prioritize a set of best practices to be implemented at individual business units for achieving its global strategic goals. In this paper, we have developed a new evaluation model together with a new implementation planning process to address this challenging issue from the viewpoints of the organization, four BSC perspectives, individual business units, and overall planning zone. In decision settings where self-assessments are required, a new adjustment method has also been developed to address the potential bias issue in the self-assessment process. The evaluation model and the implementation planning process developed in this paper provide a structured approach for an organization to manage and plan the implementation of a large and diverse set of best practices in a prioritized and phased manner. The outcome of the approach will help an organization draw a best practice implementation and management plan for the organization and for its individual business units by considering their specific strategic or operational needs. Although the approach is exemplified with the four BSC strategic perspectives and a two-level organizational structure, the MADM algorithm developed for the approach has general application for measuring the relationship between lower-level objectives and higher-level goals under any organizational settings. Thus, the approach can be applied to solve the general evaluation problem involving a given set of best practices for achieving the local objectives and global goals of a multi-level organizational structure grouped under any number of strategic perspectives.