Peer Review Program Follow-Up
The American Council of Consulting Engineers (ACEC) offers a fairly comprehensive practice review for engineering firms. These reviews are conducted by other practicing engineers ("peers") rather than consultants as a way of minimizing costs and sharing practices. We have worked with a number of firms who have had peer reviews and they report general satisfaction with the peer review reports. Implementation of recommendations, however, is another matter.
Some of the peer review recommendations are easily implemented while others take significant time and resources. An inadequate administrative process or document may often be corrected in a day or two but achieving a substantial reduction in project overruns may take a year or more of hard work. Quality issues often require fundamental changes in practices and systems, and even in the organization of the firm itself.
Firms seem to find that a majority of their peer review recommendations can be implemented without a great deal of time or effort. What remains is generally both important and difficult and, after an initial burst of effort and achievement on easier items, energy and motivation begins to disappear just when the tough items need it most. The result all too often is that these items are back-burnered and either never get done or are brought up year-after-year in annual planning sessions.
The greatest weakness of the peer review technique is that it works well for relatively simple, straightforward changes but not for major, complex ones. The latter require much more information, discussion, planning and commitment to get results. Peer review is useful for highlighting the need but not for addressing it.
The solution in many cases is to separate the more difficult recommendations from the peer review implementation effort and deal with these individually as major programs. In some cases, there is not enough information available to be able to develop a sound action plan. In others, the action plan is not well enough developed to implement properly. In more than a few instances, the risk or resource commitment is high and requires much more consideration about how, and even whether, to proceed.
Our Services
For needs that are complex and involve high stakes, high risk, or large resource commitments, we can provide:
¥ A situation assessment to give you an objective, expert view of the situation and alternatives for addressing it.
¥ Process facilitation support to help you develop a sound plan of action.
¥ Action planning and implementation support to relieve your top people of much of the chore of follow-up, progress reporting, and results assessment.
If you have questions or would like to discuss a facilitated excellence definition process for your organization, please contact us.