Self Assessment – The Working Out is More Important Then The Answer

I was facilitating a self assessment workshop using the NIMM Balanced Scorecard which I have developed, on the call were a number of senior IT operations people from a large organisation providing IT services to several thousand users.

I decided to kick off the session by getting the group to self assess the way the do end user provisioning, ie someone joins the organisation and is provided with the IT equipment and services they need to do their job. The first perspective we started with was the process perspective. I ran through what I think makes up this perspective then I sat back and listened to the conversation amongst the IT team.

The group discussed how requests for new accounts actually get initiated, this typically comes from HR or the recruiting manager, they talked about a standard word document that is used by HR to request the equipment and system  access the new starter would need. Many times during this conversation they used the word standard or talked about there being a generally accepted (if not formal) way of doing things.

What I also observed on the call was that the group were starting to suggest to each other better ways of doing things, ie. ways to optimise what they currently do. One example was to replace the document with an on-line work-flow that was better then sending around word documents to individuals for their action.

So, after a very useful debate on just one aspect of the NIMM Balanced Scorecard, the consensus amongst the group was that they were at NIMM Level 3 (Standardised) for the Process Perspective and along the way they had come up with a number of way to optimise this and get themselves to NIMM Level 4 (Optimised).

The key take way for me was that the process of doing the working out was probably more important then the end score since it helped achieve a common consensus on where they were as well as identifying for themselves a number of way to improve their own maturity.

Final thought … What is going to add more longer term maturity value, enabling experience based self assesment, or, a third part creating a set of questions and a check-list which has to be completed and sent away to be scored?