The Performance Appraisal Tool Kit

The Performance Appraisal Tool Kit
Author: Paul Falcone
Publisher: HarperChristian + ORM
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2013-05-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0814432646

The key difference between a highly successful organization and one that just merely reaches its quarterly goals--most of the time--might very well be how they address performance reviews. Are they just a perfunctory, annual “check-off,” with no other goal than to justify salary increases, or does the organization truly know how to manage and measure its employees’ performances to best impact a company’s bottom line? In The Performance Appraisal Tool Kit, you will discover a customizable appraisal template covering the essential areas of performance and conduct and learn how they can adapt it to fit varying business strategies. After all, every organization is a unique entity, therefore, the performance appraisal plan must also be unique to its company. To find the process that best increases efficiency and effectiveness in your workplace, learn how to: Profile ideal employee performance and behavior Design competencies that power performance, both at the individual and enterprise level Drive future change by setting your organization's strategic direction Retool the appraisal as needed to ratchet up expectations over time There’s nothing more valuable to a company in the long-term than a motivated and dedicated workforce. The Performance Appraisal Tool Kit gives you the resources you need to construct a performance appraisal program that will accommodate market changes, revised priorities, and increasing productivity targets--and in the end, will lift your organization to a higher level.

Beyond Performance Management

Beyond Performance Management
Author: Jeremy Hope
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2012-01-24
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1422142264

There’s a bewildering array of management tools out there. And they all promise to help you excel at the toughest parts of your job: defining your organization’s strategic direction, managing customers and costs, and boosting workforce performance. But just 30 percent of these tools deliver as intended. Why? As Jeremy Hope and Steve Player reveal in Beyond Performance Management, while many tools are sound in theory, they’re misused by most organizations. For example, executives buy and implement a tool without first asking, “What problem are we trying to solve?” And they use tools to command and control frontline teams, not empower them—a serious and costly mistake. In this eminently useful, clear-eyed book, the authors critically review dozens of well-known management tools—from mission statements, balanced scorecards, and rolling forecasts to key performance indicators, Six Sigma, and performance appraisals. They explain how to select the right tools for your organization, how to implement them correctly, and how to extract maximum value from each. Brimming with rigorous analysis and solid advice, Beyond Performance Management helps you swiftly gauge the value of each management tool, as well as navigate the increasingly crowded field of offerings—so the tools you select deliver fully on their promise.

Systems Performance

Systems Performance
Author: Brendan Gregg
Publisher: Pearson Education
Total Pages: 777
Release: 2014
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0133390098

The Complete Guide to Optimizing Systems Performance Written by the winner of the 2013 LISA Award for Outstanding Achievement in System Administration Large-scale enterprise, cloud, and virtualized computing systems have introduced serious performance challenges. Now, internationally renowned performance expert Brendan Gregg has brought together proven methodologies, tools, and metrics for analyzing and tuning even the most complex environments. Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud focuses on Linux(R) and Unix(R) performance, while illuminating performance issues that are relevant to all operating systems. You'll gain deep insight into how systems work and perform, and learn methodologies for analyzing and improving system and application performance. Gregg presents examples from bare-metal systems and virtualized cloud tenants running Linux-based Ubuntu(R), Fedora(R), CentOS, and the illumos-based Joyent(R) SmartOS(TM) and OmniTI OmniOS(R). He systematically covers modern systems performance, including the "traditional" analysis of CPUs, memory, disks, and networks, and new areas including cloud computing and dynamic tracing. This book also helps you identify and fix the "unknown unknowns" of complex performance: bottlenecks that emerge from elements and interactions you were not aware of. The text concludes with a detailed case study, showing how a real cloud customer issue was analyzed from start to finish. Coverage includes - Modern performance analysis and tuning: terminology, concepts, models, methods, and techniques - Dynamic tracing techniques and tools, including examples of DTrace, SystemTap, and perf - Kernel internals: uncovering what the OS is doing - Using system observability tools, interfaces, and frameworks - Understanding and monitoring application performance - Optimizing CPUs: processors, cores, hardware threads, caches, interconnects, and kernel scheduling - Memory optimization: virtual memory, paging, swapping, memory architectures, busses, address spaces, and allocators - File system I/O, including caching - Storage devices/controllers, disk I/O workloads, RAID, and kernel I/O - Network-related performance issues: protocols, sockets, interfaces, and physical connections - Performance implications of OS and hardware-based virtualization, and new issues encountered with cloud computing - Benchmarking: getting accurate results and avoiding common mistakes This guide is indispensable for anyone who operates enterprise or cloud environments: system, network, database, and web admins; developers; and other professionals. For students and others new to optimization, it also provides exercises reflecting Gregg's extensive instructional experience.

Monitoring Business Performance

Monitoring Business Performance
Author: Per Lind
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2014-07-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 113504497X

The idea of using models to inform business practice seems appealing, as it suggests the abstraction and control of a large, complex subject by means of a smaller, easily manipulated mechanism. In reality, however, many models prove inadequate when translated into business methods. Monitoring Business Performance – Models, Methods and Tools elucidates how the assumptions and perceptions that guide performance assessment are often based on models that are poor interpretations and descriptions of reality. In this book, the author scrutinizes the models underlying a number of well-known business methods and tools, and sheds light on the assumptions and subjective perceptions that undermine their effectiveness. In doing so, he offers a unique criticism of accepting business models without questioning their relevance and applicability, and highlights the need to treat models as hypotheses, rather than as certainties.

Scaling Up Excellence

Scaling Up Excellence
Author: Robert I. Sutton
Publisher: Crown Currency
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2014-02-04
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0385347030

Wall Street Journal Bestseller "The pick of 2014's management books." –Andrew Hill, Financial Times "One of the top business books of the year." –Harvey Schacter, The Globe and Mail Bestselling author, Robert Sutton and Stanford colleague, Huggy Rao tackle a challenge that determines every organization’s success: how to scale up farther, faster, and more effectively as an organization grows. Sutton and Rao have devoted much of the last decade to uncovering what it takes to build and uncover pockets of exemplary performance, to help spread them, and to keep recharging organizations with ever better work practices. Drawing on inside accounts and case studies and academic research from a wealth of industries-- including start-ups, pharmaceuticals, airlines, retail, financial services, high-tech, education, non-profits, government, and healthcare-- Sutton and Rao identify the key scaling challenges that confront every organization. They tackle the difficult trade-offs that organizations must make between whether to encourage individualized approaches tailored to local needs or to replicate the same practices and customs as an organization or program expands. They reveal how the best leaders and teams develop, spread, and instill the right mindsets in their people-- rather than ruining or watering down the very things that have fueled successful growth in the past. They unpack the principles that help to cascade excellence throughout an organization, as well as show how to eliminate destructive beliefs and behaviors that will hold them back. Scaling Up Excellence is the first major business book devoted to this universal and vexing challenge and it is destined to become the standard bearer in the field.

Performance Measurement and Management for Engineers

Performance Measurement and Management for Engineers
Author: Michela Arnaboldi
Publisher: Academic Press
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2014-09-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0128019204

Performance Measurement and Management for Engineers introduces key concepts in finance, accounting, and management to project managers who have engineering backgrounds. It focuses these basic concepts on issues of measuring and managing enterprise value. Thus, after defining enterprise value, the book begins by explaining the ways and means of measurement. It then takes up financial measurement, describing and analyzing the typologies of financial indicators while illustrating their advantages and disadvantages. After focusing on measuring enterprise value, the second section takes up managing that value. Like the first, it pursues a double view: using indicators for internal control while employing them to analyze other companies. If engineering project managers possess a source of quantitative and qualitative information about business management, Performance Measurement and Management for Engineers will help them increase their contributions to the business. - Explains how main performance indicators are related to the value of the company - Reveals how to assess the financial needs of companies in relation to their financial goals and mechanisms (e.g., equity, debt, and hybrid) - Describes key information and indicators for assessing the ability of enterprises to create value across time - Indicates the profitability sources of different business units