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Performance Support Solutions: Achieving Business Goals Through Enabling User Performance

by William Bezanson

354 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #02-0280; ISBN 1-55369-467-8; US$30.00, C$45.00, EUR29.30, £20.30

Performance support is a rapidly growing discipline of enabling human performance on the job, rather than through off-job training or extensive reading, thus helping organizations to achieve business goals. This book summarizaes many ways of incorporating techniques of performance support which product groups can adopt, to have profound impacts on their businesses.

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about the book      about the author      summarized Table of Contents and excerpt      catalogue info

About the Book Performance support is a rapidly growing discipline of enabling human performance on the job. It helps people to do their jobs and to develop competence through the normal course of doing work, rather than through off-job training or extensive reading. Ultimately, it supports the performance of a business, through enabling the performance of individual workers. It has demonstrated dramatically improved performance by many types of workers and their businesses. This book summarizes many ways of incorporating techniques of performance support in the workplace, systems, and processes of organizations. Some of the ways are simple, some more complex. The author's hope is that you might adopt even one or two of these methods, and that doing so will save money for you and your organization, and that doing so will enable you to make a profound impact on the business of your organization and that of your customers. Nearly all companies have the difficulty that it takes too long and costs too much to develop competence in their employees. Modern computer systems change so frequently, and applications and work environments are so poorly designed, that there is constant retraining going on. Work processes change to keep up with competitive pressures. Classroom training nearly always misses the mark by being late or ineffective in transferring skills back to the job. The fact that people need to be trained to use products in the first place is the essence of the problem. This book addresses that problem by means of various methods of performance support. Further, it presents a structure for developing "performance support solutions," which allow a phased introduction of performance-enabling features in products over time, to accommodate customers' varying budget and infrastructure levels. The value proposition for performance support is that for relatively modest investment, a high return can be realized for the cost of product ownership and support. This investment can be as little as zero (by incorporating performance-centered design methods into a product development process) and as much as ten person-years or more (for a high-end integrated performance support and knowledge management system). A Performance Support Solution strategy can allocate the investment to a rollout of PS features over time. Endorsements Bill Bezanson practices what he preaches with Performance Support Solutions. This book is a comprehensive, pragmatic, and precise treatment of the field of Performance Support. It covers all aspects of the field and, in keeping with Bill's advocacy for "obvious products," the book is itself an obvious product. Every Performance Technologist, whether a novice or an expert, will benefit from keeping this book in close proximity. Especially relevant is his compilation of "N ways to implement performance support solutions," which facilitates incremental design of solutions, thus appealing to diverse development budgets or customer infrastructure readiness. In developing such an all-encompassing piece of work, Bill clearly demonstrates his assertion that "Performance Support work is more than a job: it is a calling," and those of us in the field should be happy that he feels that way! He has made our jobs a lot easier by providing us with an up-to-date, insightful review of the leading-edge thinking in our field. Dr. Tony O'Driscoll Author of Achieving Desired Business Performance, and Researcher with IBM's Institute for Advanced Learning, Raleigh, North Carolina. Bezanson's authoritative, yet very readable work gives every organisation a motive for introducing, implementing, or improving their performance support solutions. It is well researched, full of great yet simple and implementable ideas, examples, and models, and while it satisfies the stringent academic criteria making it a useful reference and teaching aid, its real value lies in its grounding in the realities of the modern busy and complex workplace. It is obvious that the author speaks from many years of experience thinking about and grappling with user and organisational performance support issues. Dr. Gitte Lindgaard Professor and Chair, User-Centered Design Department of Psychology Carleton University Ottawa, Canada Bill Bezanson's Performance Support Solutions is a comprehensive and practical guide for making products obvious, minimizing the need for costly training and product support. In today's increasingly complex and time-pressured world, this is a much-welcomed effort. Anyone interested in making systems easier to use needs to read this book! Mark W. Morgan, EdD President, Momentum Performance Group Co-author, Performance Scorecards: Measuring the Right Things In the Real World.

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About the Author William Bezanson, P.Eng, advises organizations on performance support solutions through his company, Performance Solutions Architecture. He is a registered professional engineer in Ontario, Canada. His professional interests include leveraging experience with a performance support engineering program to influence corporate technical communications and customer support strategies. His long-term vision is enabling business performance through user performance, thus reducing the need for explicit forms of learning and user support. He lives with his family in Ottawa. His another book: Why Are Gas Prices So High?

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Summarized Table of Contents and Excerpt

SUMMARY OF CONTENTS

Part A: Want Better Users?
Chapter 1. Supporting Performance
Chapter 2. Performance Support
Chapter 3. Justifying Performance Support

Part B: Making Products Obvious
Chapter 4. Performance-Centered Systems
Chapter 5. Making Products Obvious
Chapter 6. Developing Performance Support Solutions

Part C: N Ways to Implement Performance Support Solutions
Chapter 7. Marketing PSSolutions
Chapter 8. Performance Architecture for PSSolutions
Chapter 9. Implementing PSSolutions

Part D: Advanced Topics
Chapter 10. Other PSSolution Development Considerations
Chapter 11. User Support Environment Protocol
Chapter 12. Conclusion

Appendices: A Business Case for Performance Support
References
Author Index
General Index

from Chapter 2. Performance Support

The philosophy of performance support aims at supporting user and business performance. This means helping users of systems or applications perform competently on the job, and to develop that competence quickly. This enhanced user performance will translate into enhanced business performance.

Performance support enhances this performance by helping users achieve their goals, within the context of business goals.

(section omitted)

Performance support solutions

Finally, nearing the end of this chapter, I introduce the most important notion of all, performance support solutions.

Developing a solution, rather than a system, is likely the appropriate business decision in most situations. It can be dangerous to rush into developing a performance support system before understanding the real needs of the business and of the end user community.

Such a situation will be familiar to training professionals. Often a customer will declare, "We need a course." What they really mean is that they have a performance problem, and that they think that a learning solution is appropriate. Their usual mental model for such a solution is a classroom-based course. (They also typically want it to be very brief and very soon.) Trainers know that they must do a needs analysis, and that the result might be a recommendation for not a course, but a document, or a job aid, or a peer-mentoring scheme, or some set of non-classroom solutions (or a better product).

Similarly, for performance support applications, it is important to analyze the real needs first, and then to recommend whatever performance support solution is best.

A performance support solution is a coherent set of performance support tools, systems, services, and activities that address the real performance needs of the affected businesses and end users.

With this definition in mind, let us consider a performance support solution for a large company with experienced staff and an installed base of stable products. In a few years the company will face a significant staff attrition due to retirement of experienced people. The challenge is how to replace their experience, given that it takes two years or more to develop expertise by traditional methods.

A performance support solution for this challenge might include the full range of the following items (or others as appropriate), properly planned, integrated, deployed, and evolved over the full life cycle of the enterprise. The whole rollout may take only a few months or many years, depending on the business parameters. The following scenario has the intent of developing user performance with a phased rollout of job aids, documents, tutorials, and so on, leading up to a full performance support system. For this company, it would be totally out of the question to do a sudden cutover to a totally new method of supporting users on their jobs. The legacy practices, documents, courses, and equipment (not to mention the people) all need to be accommodated and migrated smoothly.

So my suggested performance support solution is:

• Preparatory: Set a vision for supporting users on their jobs. Formulate strategy and objectives for moving toward the vision. Do benchmark metrics, in order to know later how much success you achieved. Set performance targets for each of the following phases. Plan for computing and organizational infrastructure, as appropriate.
• Phase 1: Develop a new job aid, with task structured user guidance, for the highest priority task. Deploy it on paper. Work out bugs with it and with the deployment mechanism.
• Phase 2: Put the above job aid online. Deploy updates and extensions to it. Add more job aids, as appropriate.
• Phase 3: Translate the standard reference materials for online access. Deploy them, and link the job aids to them.
• Phase 4: Develop tutorials, demonstrations, quizzes, and other such learning aids. Link them to the job aids and documents. Deploy them.
• Phase 5: Develop a dynamic update mechanism for the user support materials. Deploy it.
• Phase 6: Develop a user-defined learning system to capture best practices. Integrate all of the above together.
• Future: Move toward a fully integrated user support environment, which provides support across multiple products and job processes.

The above scenario is only an example. It can be viewed as one big performance support solution, or a set of smaller such solutions. An incremental, phased rollout such as this may be appropriate for supporting users with an existing system that must be kept running. For a brand new product, or set of products, it may be reasonable to introduce a full performance support system with it.

Note that the above phases may be considered either phases in time, or levels of sophistication in performance support. Thus, some customers may want to proceed sequentially through the phases over a several year timeframe. Other customers may be ready to proceed straight to phase 3 or 4. And, of course, other development and rollout structures are possible, also.

Another example of a performance support solution is presented by Barry Raybould [1997b]. He refers to it as "The five phases of migration from training to knowledge management," but it is an excellent illustration of what I am referring to in this section. Raybould points out that many organizations are not ready to move totally to a full performance support environment. For example, they may not have the right infrastructure in place. Or they may have a lot of knowledge already stored in electronic form such as computer-based training courses or online documents, but not in a form suitable for supporting peoples' performance. So he outlines five phases, leading to maturity in a performance-oriented approach:

• Phase 1: Instructor-led training. This "entry-level" phase focuses on transferring knowledge, with little use of technology.
• Phase 2: Computer-based training. Here, training is moved into electronic form for efficiencies, but training is still emphasized, not performance.
• Phase 3: Extrinsic PSS design and linked performance support frameworks. In this phase, performance is retrofitted onto products, rather than being designed in. Thus, coaches, cue-cards, or advisors could be added to existing applications, or a PSS could be linked to applications. However, "it is impossible to build a task-oriented interface on top of highly unstructured knowledge resources," [p 46] so this phase should be considered an interim solution in the migration to phase 5.
• Phase 4: Intrinsic PSS design. This phase involves "intrinsic performance-centered design, in which knowledge and work processes are transparently embedded into the software that job performers are using to do their work." [p 46] The organization has matured to the point of embracing human performance into their design processes. Training groups design performance support tools, and software groups build performance into their products.
• Phase 5: Knowledge management infrastructures. In this final phase, performance support systems become the electronic infrastructures that enable organizational learning and knowledge management. Here, an organization has recognized the strategic importance of its intellectual capital, and has learned to manage it. Performance support and knowledge management are equal partners in fostering the organization's maturity.

A final example can be taken from IBM's experience with what they call an "ERP Factory," as reported in [Duke-Moran 1999]. The authors point out that an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is more than just the Information Technology part that has been recognized historically. "The system is an integrated system with software, hardware, and Œpeopleware' components. ... The peopleware component is a necessary condition for achieving desired business results from the system. As a result, the total cost of ownership of an ERP package is increased dramatically when the peopleware component is neglected or relegated to a minor role." [p. 31]

IBM has developed metrics to evaluate the need for peopleware support, based on the risks of inadequate job performance for business goals. From analyzing those metrics, their approach is to develop a blended solution of computer-based training, instructor-led training, and a performance support system, all structured around a set of reusable knowledge objects, and integrated with the base ERP system. Such a blended solution is an excellent example of what I mean by a performance support solution.

The key point of this section is to look beyond the technology of performance support systems to the real business needs, which may more appropriately be addressed by performance support solutions. I hope that the examples that were outlined here give you a sense of the vast organizational and business scope that can be addressed by performance support solutions.

This topic will be elaborated in chapter 6.

Summary

In this chapter, I have defined performance support and discussed its implementation in performance support systems.

The notion of performance support grew out of the education and training fields. But performance support goes far beyond training. Its greatest impact is in its ability to solve business, not educational, problems. It is not learning, but performance, that is important. The key motivation for performance support is that it is desirable to enhance someone's performance without necessarily promoting learning.

As Tony O'Driscoll [1999, p 124] summarizes:

As the pace of technological change speeds up, many jobs will require constant adaptation because of new information and new task requirements. In this context, the distinction between learning and work will disappear. A trend toward integrating training with on-the-job activities will be a result. This trend will extend itself to the point that training, as a distinct function, will no longer be the primary learning vehicle for many types of jobs. Workers will use on-the-job information systems instead.

The main concern that performance support professionals should keep in mind is the likely need for performance support solutions. Thus, we must analyze overall business needs and planned evolution, influence them both, and be ready to drive the implementation of a set of performance support features, tools, and components that enable the business to move toward its long term goals. This analyzing, influencing, and driving is key to developing performance support solutions.

Performance support solutions provide a phased rollout, or modular availability, of increasingly sophisticated types of performance support. They are developed iteratively, with close customer involvement. They have the potential to distinguish a company in the marketplace, by demonstrating large-scale strategic customer partnerships for effective user support.

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Catalogue Information

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