Distinctly Different
What's different about Comparison International's services?
Many organisations benchmark products and services, or compare metrics/measures with those of their competitors and peers. These approaches can pinpoint performance shortfalls, but are limited in their contribution to learning and improvement. Best practice (or 'diagnostic') benchmarking and process benchmarking use comparisons with what others are doing, and learning from how they are doing it, as a method of driving continuous improvement. Does your organisation make effective use of these more advanced forms of benchmarking? If such activity exists, how is it formally incorporated into improvement activities and what has been achieved?
Our feedback processes consistently demonstrate outstandingly high levels of satisfaction — for those prepared to invest the effort, the PROBE process is a goldmine of opportunities to learn, to better understand organisational performance and its drivers and, of course, to improve.
Our customers and partners say it best:
Dingle, 1994: Phil Hanson came to Ireland, to Kerry, to Dingle to talk to the Microscope Consortium about a new benchmarking tool for small and medium sized businesses. Since then thousands of companies across Europe and the world have used this form of benchmarking as an aid to their development and improvement processes. Ireland adopted the version of PROBE called ‘Microscope’ as its base benchmarking tool and has subsequently benchmarked over 500 Irish companies. Many companies have asked to be benchmarked over a number of years to monitor their progress and improvements made. They have also used the process to gain a consensus between managers on the next level of challenge facing their businesses. As part of a broader package of support for Irish businesses, the impact of best practice benchmarking on quality, productivity and competitiveness has been substantial.
Dr. Richard Keegan
Senior Specialist in Benchmarking and Best Practice Enterprise Ireland;
and Leader of the European Benchmarking Forum
Enterprise Ireland
We used PROBE for Public Service as one of a range of tools to review the value for money being provided by our support services. I feel the PROBE added strength to the process in various ways, including:
- independent facilitation
- opportunity to benchmark across sectors
- a quick, broad brushinsight into services across a number of dimensions
- and perhaps most important of all, the opportunity to get a cross section of people from our teams involved in assessing themselves and debating service quality
...very much a tool for doing "with" not doing "to", which is very important to us.
Joy Brindle
Assistant Chief Executive
District of Easington Council
We briefed the team and gave people time to look at the questionnaire individually, and then we met as a group for an initial discussion. This prepared us for the main session with the external facilitator. That is probably the strongest element of the tool — the opportunity to get a diverse group of people together — managers and representatives from all areas of the staff — to debate the questions. It allowed the staff to challenge some of the assumptions of the managers, particularly in areas around communication, leadership and people management.
Richard Clayton
(formerly) Pathology Service Manager
at a Hospital Trust
within the UK's National Health Service
PROBE for Learning provided us with a summary of our strengths and weaknesses against a wider framework than those we had previously used and enabled us to assess all areas of the college against one framework.
Further Education College, UK
2003
The benchmarking session proved to be a rich team-building exercise and has added to the continuing development of the team members. We covered areas that we have not discussed previously and shared information and ideas that will make a difference both to our learners and the organisation overall.
Work Based Learning Provider, UK
2003
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