BRM Benchmarking
How do you compare to other BRMs? How does your organization’s BRM capability compare to others? Are you leading or trailing your peers? You can find out in a matter of minutes!
No matter where you are in your BRM journey, you are encouraged to participate in and benefit from, the BRM Benchmark provided by BRM Institute.
In an effort to offer the very best to the single, global BRM community, BRM Institute is developing a brand new Benchmarking Survey Experience.
The Benchmarking Collection period will open in Fall of 2023.
The Benchmarking Survey will be open Fall of 2023!
Your small investment in time can open a new world to you of discovery and learning about your profession.
Seven Reasons to Benchmark
We all make comparisons. We do it all the time in our personal lives and our work lives. We just don’t always call it “benchmarking” and we’re not always conscious of it. If you want to be a better tennis player, you would compare your current skills to better players and try to learn what better players have done to reach their higher level of ability. Benchmark is a short way of saying, “making and learning from useful comparisons“. It is easy to make comparisons, but it is harder to learn from them. Benchmarking detractors struggle with the learning part. Here are seven reasons why the struggle is worth overcoming.
Effective Way to Identify Performance Improvements and Value Opportunities
We all want to improve, but where do we start? Maybe your mission and vision is clear, but your method and path for achievement is elusive. Comparisons can help reveal what others have done to overcome the barriers you currently face. And, comparisons can help you identify opportunities you currently are unaware are available for you. Participating in a benchmarking program costs you a few minutes of your time and yet provides a deep reservoir of comparative information to lead to insights; therefore, the entry cost is low and the potential is high.
Discover Where You Lead or Follow
Complacency is a dangerous thing. We get used to things being the way they are. To the extreme, we even become attached or dependent on the status quo. Comparisons help shake things up. You can find out that your status quo is someone else’s past and they have moved on to greater success. That is the kind of cold slap-in-the-face that can motivate change.
Improve Communication with a Shared Language
Effective benchmarks must have language clarity in order for all participants to have the same interpretation of any question they are asked. Without this clarity, the comparative value of the benchmark diminishes. With language clarity, the value flourishes. Your organization can leverage this clarity by letting the benchmark not only provide a shared language, but also raise the bar in what is expected when it comes to any form of communication clarity.
Find Ways to Improve
Why continue to perfect the things that you’re already good at? Focus on the things that actually need improvement. It takes courage to address the things that need improvement and it helps to have the optics to focus in on them. Benchmarking provides a focus that is direct, clear, and based on undeniable evidence.
Stimulate Ideas
You network with your peers because there is synergy in groups. You might come up with fresh ideas on how to solve a problem you might not have conceived on your own. A benchmark is a network of peers, only instead of meeting face-to-face, we share common information with one another which serves each of us with insights and ideas if we look for them.
Create a Business Case for Change
Sometimes it seems it is as hard to make a convincing argument to someone that a change is needed as it is to actually make the change. It helps to have evidence that the proposed changes have been done before and the benefits realized were worth the costs incurred.
Establish a Baseline to Improve Upon and Track Progress
The Kaizen approach to continuous improvement involves measurement. Improvement is measured from one deliberate improvement to the next. Benchmarks provide a tool and baseline of information to measure improvement initiatives. It is not surprising that benchmarking is a common tool used by Six Sigma practitioners.