Benchmarking is a highly respected practice in the business world. It is an activity that looks outside the business or local operation to find best practice and to identify high performance. It identifies where your organization outperforms or underperforms in comparison to your peer group. Its ultimate goal is to help you improve your organization’s performance. The critical question that then arises is how to close the gap. The answer often lies within your company. There is an great probability that a subset of individuals in your company are delivering results at or above the level of the best practices which you have uncovered. If these practices can be codified and scaled, they can provide a way to quickly and reliably boost performance.

The thesis is simple. These high performers have figured out how to adapt or work around the current systems, processes and tools to consistently deliver superior results. If you were able to bring the average performance of the rest of your organization up to the level of these high performers, you would enjoy a substantial gain. The goal of the internal best practices review is recognize and understand how high perofrmers out deliver their peers.

By codifying the high performer's process, methods, tools and decision making approach, we determine how to best deploy them on a broad basis. Using a method called Day-In-the-Life-Of (DILO), we have the high performers walk us through their unique work process, including their decision making and their utilization of systems and tools. For example in a sales process, the sales professional details the life of a specific transaction to provide four core elements:

1. Process – Exactly what was done from the identification of the lead to the completion of the sale. The individual cites how this example works as compared to most of his or her sales efforts so the differences can be captured. The process is then codified at two levels – objectives and tasks. The objectives identify what you are trying to accomplish. The task level represents the detailed approach to which the flow of information, use of templates, systems and touch-points as defined below the example are mapped to meet each objective.
   
2. Information Flow – Catalog the flow of information as it flows through the process.
   
3. Templates – What forms, materials etc are used to support the sale. Collect examples of the final work product, meeting notes etc. which are catalogued against the process.
   
4. Systems – Identify which systems the professional used to support or capture his or her work (such as Seibel, externally hosted systems such as SalesForce.com or stand alone desktop tools). Where possible, capture system supports and inefficiencies to find near term system improvements or boost usage.
   
5. Touch-points – Map the touch-points to other individuals or functions that support the process to better understand the organizational implications of the process.

Working with small, similar groups of high performers gives insight into how each group approaches their work. Looking across groups allows standard solutions to be identified or developed. For example, if two individuals do the same thing, it is not necessary to address this. However, if they approach the same task differently, the differences can be discussed to determine the best way to accomplish the tasks. One to two-day modeling sessions with each group serves to capture the group's baseline approach. A one or two day workshop with all of the individuals is sufficient to sort through any differences across groups. There are two added benefits of this approach. First, the high performers learn from each other; second, they become subject matter experts in the field to support implementation.

When performance data for the high performer participants is compared to the rest of the organization, the value of improvement can be quantified.