2.1 Best Practice
2.2 Benchmarking
2.3 Nature of Study
It was a stated objective of this study to identify best business management practice in Adult Community Education by establishing best practice benchmarks. Yet what is best practice? The Australian Best Practice Demonstration Program (1994) defines best practice as a comprehensive, integrated and cooperative approach to the continuous improvement of all facets of an organisation’s operations.
Best practice is not a fixed concept but a process of an organisation looking at how it is doing things now and identifying how it could do better. Best practice as a concept has been used in manufacturing industry for a number of years and according to the Australian Best Practice Demonstration Program (1994) is based on the following principles:
· shared vision;
· strategic planning;
· commitment to change;
· cooperative and participative industrial relations;
· a commitment to continuos improvement;
· innovative human resource policies;
· a focus on customers (both internal and external);
· the pursuit of innovation in technology, products and processes;
· benchmarking; and
· the establishment of external networks.
Best practice then is a process whereby an organisation continuously strives to better its current good practice. It involves an organisation undertaking improvements in a range of areas as noted above. Benchmarking is a tool used by an organisation to assist it in improving its current practice.
MacNeil (1994) in Benchmarking Australia defines benchmarking as a method for continuous improvement that involves an ongoing and systematic evaluation and incorporation of external products, services and processes recognised as representing best practice.
MacNeil claims that the most significant effects of benchmarking are not one off productivity gains or cost reductions but the creation of a change - oriented organisational culture. Benchmarking as it has been classically applied in industry involves the following process (MacNeil 1994).
· Establishing the strategic intent and strategic objectives of the organisation and identifying critical success factors.
· Educating all members of the organisation, gaining their commitment to change, and assigning responsibility for benchmarking.
· Analysing organisational processes and current performance and selecting processes for benchmarking according to strategic imperatives.
· Identifying best practice sources and establishing necessary relationships.
· Determining and standardising data collection methods.
· Gathering data - visiting partners, measuring and documenting partner performance.
· Analysing data to determine current performance gaps and identifying improvement opportunities.
· Communicating benchmark findings to employees at all levels.
· Establishing functional goals and developing implementation plans.
· Obtaining resources and implementing specific actions.
· Monitoring, reporting, and assessing programs based on best practice goals.
· Recalibrating benchmarks to incorporate upwards movement in best practice.
· Integrating benchmarking outcomes into strategic planning process.
Clearly classical benchmarking is based on very mechanistic industrial processes and does not readily translate into a meaningful process for the ACE sector.
In undertaking the "Good, Better, Best Management Practices in ACE" research project it became apparent that a classical benchmarking process would not be appropriate given the time and scope of the project. It was decided to modify the classical process in order to establish what current business management practices were being used in the sector and how well established these were.
A major challenge of this study therefore has been to demonstrate that a process like benchmarking can be modified and its language adapted to make it meaningful to the community education sector. The main task in this process has been the identification of management practices that are widely used in the sector and which have been identified as being important to the success of the agency.
In designing this study a key consideration was the identification of appropriate business management practices and how these were contributing to agency outcomes. Following a review of the current literature it became apparent that this was an area of study that had not received sufficient attention.. It was clear therefore that this study would be of an exploratory nature. Finestone and Kahn (1975) describe the specific purposes of an exploratory study as including the conceptual definition of variables and ways to measure them as well as the development of methodological approaches to research.
One of the aims of the research was to define what constituted good management practice in the adult community education sector and to test the validity of theses practices to the field by examining the extent to which theses practices were being used by agencies in the study. The task of developing benchmarks would follow more naturally once it was apparent what practices were being used in the sector and how widely these we seen as contributing to the success of agencies.
Another key element of the study was to translate specific management aspects into meaningful practices that providers could relate to their daily operations. Hence general management practices were broken down into individual components. For example Strategic Planning was examined in terms of evaluation of programs, identification of changes affecting the sector as a whole and an examination of the social, cultural and economic profile of the agency’s community. In this way agencies were better able to reflect on their practices and relate them to general management practices.
