A Guide To Performance Management

Nowadays, a great significance is being given to Performance Management, as companies incorporate them in their effective management strategies. However, a lot of people find this process a complicated one, mostly because of the many options that it offers – on the organization, a specific department/branch, a product or service, and on employees, among others.

In order to minimize this confusion, the items below will give you a general idea of what Performance Management is all about as well as the activities that are involved in this process.

What is Performance Management?

Performance management is a process that provides both the manager and the employee (the person being supervised) the chance to determine the shared goals that relates to the overall goals of the company by looking into employee performance.

Why is it important?

Performance Management establishes an outline for employees and their performance managers to assess and to come to an agreement on certain concerns and aims that are in accordance with the overall structure of the company. This enables both parties to have clear objectives that would help them in their work and in their professional growth.

Who conducts Performance Management?

Performance Management is carried out by those who oversee the performance of other people – work/team leaders, supervisors, managers, directors, or department chairs.

What are the processes involved?

Below are the phases of the Performance Management process:

1. Planning

This phase of Performance Management process includes establishing job descriptions and identifying the employee’s essential functions as well as defining the strategic plan/s of the department or the company as a whole.

Job Description

A job description is used to advertise a vacant position, which typically specifies the following:

- The specific functions, tasks, and responsibilities of the position
- The amount of time needed to act upon each function
- The qualifications needed (skills, knowledge and abilities) to perform the job
- The physical and mental requirements of the position
- Salary range for the position
- To whom the position reports

Job descriptions should be disclosed to the employee as soon as he or she is hired. Note, however, that job descriptions are listed using words that make it difficult to measure the employee’s performance. They are in contrast with competencies, which list the skills needed in performing such tasks and are described using terms that can be measured.

Strategic Plan

In effect, a strategic plan tells you three things:

- Where the company is heading in the coming year/s.
- How the company is going to get there.
- How the company will know if it is already there or not.

Included in a strategic plan are the following:

Mission statement – the primary reason why your department (or company) exists.

Goals – associated with the mission statement, they determine the results that will advance said statement/s.

Strategic initiatives – specifies definite steps that must be taken to accomplish each goal. It is a dynamic process, usually examined during periods such as one or two years.

2. Developing

This phase of Performance Management process includes developing performance standards, which offers a scale that describes how a specific job should be performed in order to meet (or exceed) expectations. They are explained to newly hired employees and are later used to evaluate work performance.

Performance standards are generally outlined with the help of the employees who actually perform the tasks or functions. There are a number of advantages with this approach:

- The standards will be suitable to the requirements of the job
- The standards will be applicable to actual work conditions
- The standards will be easily understood by the employee (and performance manager as well)
- The standards will be acknowledged (and received) by the employee and the performance manager

Standards of performance are usually in the form of ratings (1 to 5, A to E) that are used by performance managers to rate the employee’s actual level of performance.

3. Monitoring

This phase of the Performance Management process includes monitoring employee’s work performances and giving feedback about them.

As the basis of feedback, observations should be verifiable: they should involve noticeable and work-related facts, events, behaviors, actions, statements, and results. Feedback of this type is called behavioral feedback, and they help employees improve and/or sustain good performance by precisely identifying the areas that the employee needs to improve without judging his or her character or motives.

4. Rating

This phase includes conducting performance evaluations. This is the critical aspect of the Performance Management process, especially because it is important for performance managers to arrive at an unbiased assessment.

A performance appraisal form has the following features:

- Employee information
- Performance standards
- Rating scale
- Signatures
- Employee performance development recommendations
- Employee comments
- Employee’s Self-appraisal

Why conduct performance appraisals? It provides an opportunity to improve performance in the future not only for employees, but for managers as well. Performance appraisals enable managers to acquire information from employees that will help them make employee's jobs more productive.

5. Development Planning

This phase of the Performance Management process includes establishing plans for improved employee performance and development goals. This advances the overall goal of the company and at the same time increases the quality of work by employees by:

- Encouraging constant learning and professional growth.
- Helping employees maintain the level of performance that meets (and exceeds) expectations.
- Improving job - or career-related skills and experience.

In closing, Performance Management is a process that, when executed fairly and effectively, can improve the quality of the company’s workforce, raise standards, increase job satisfaction, and develop professionalism and expertise that would benefit not only the employees but the entire organization as well.

Asset Management Software guide

Asset management is the need of the hour. Any business dealing in manufacturing, distribution, physical sales, office or call center work has some physical and non-physical assets. The technique of choosing the appropriate equipment for a particular job, keep it functioning as long as possible and replacing it in a systematic way is the key to good management.


Today assets can be the means to some wonderful and lucrative ends. So asset management is no less than an art and can be stated as a comprehensive and structured approach to the long-term management of assets as tools for the efficient and effective delivery of community benefits.


Managing one’s assets requires firstly an identification of need for the asset in accordance with the community requirements. Secondly you have to see the provision of the asset including its current maintenance and rehabilitation as per your needs. Third is the operation of the asset while the fourth is the disposal of the asset when it is no longer needed or beneficial in any way.


Due to a surge in the involvement of people in asset management task, various companies have come up with asset management software. Asset management software maintains a record of all the assets you wish to monitor. It is designed to manage assets, contracts, purchases and vendors at an economical price. Asset management software keeps a record of hardware, licenses, leasing information and so forth. It also guides as to which new equipment needs to be purchased, the quantity of equipment owned and when leases are up.


Asset management software is of a great use. There are quite a few benefits of implementing an asset management software solution. For instance the asset management allows the automation of processes rather than manually creating paper trails that can be torn or lost, it also tracks your company’s software assets and licenses, provides management reports on companies assets, track company leases and hardware material, minimizes the expense especially by reducing the total ownership cost and serves as a user interface for the people to track their assets. The asset management software also integrates with incident and problem management, change and configuration management, service level management and other related Business Service Management processes straight out of the box.

There are three different kinds of asset management software-


a)    Inquisitive- software is designed to interrogate or query the IT systems and identifies hardware configurations or peripherals or operating system and other software.

b)    Repository- software organizes the collected data and stores it to allow an easy access for reporting and analysis.


c)    Automated data collection type of asset management software tracks, records accurate data in time.

The asset management software comes in different packages. While choosing such a software package check out the functionality you need or the kind of task that you want the software to perform. Then take a look at the price and benefit of the package over the others. Also consider the package from the number of users perspective. Here you should bear in mind the overwriting risk of multiple users having the same files open at a given time. You should also know what is the scalability of the software, that can it cater to new avenues in countries other than your own and last but not the least you must find out if the software works with ITIL best practices.