Performer

Performer took over my life for around a year. It had a bad start in life in that I went to the initial meeting to discuss the product and came out to find that my car broken in to and my radio had been stolen! Still, I guess that's something we all get used to eventually.

Describing Performer is relatively simple. It's a software suite targeting individuals and organisations with a desire to make very real improvements in the quality of their managerial skills. Working in a modular fashion, the software allows individuals to

identify the occupational standards which are relevant to their jobs,
assess their competence from 360^o perspectives,
assess their knowledge and understanding,
plan to develop the skills necessary to enhance their performance.

The Performance Manager module allows line managers to

gather together team skills and knowledge,
ensure that job roles are accurate and appropriate,
focus training and development in the areas that need it most,
agree performance targets with individuals.

Essentially, people answer a questionnaire and the software responds with a profile of their jobs, based on the Management Standards that were published by MCI. These standards were widely recognised nationally, so we had a firm foundation to start with.

Having profiled your role, the second module allowed you to assess how well you performed against the standards. This was essentially a 360^o evaluation of your skills involving your managers, peers and subordinates.

Once you have a profile and a skills assessment, the results were exported to your manager who gathered all of the results together for a group of people and produced a departmental training needs assessment.

The process was run through for real with a local council and the results were very encouraging.

The real nice part about this was that the software was primarily data driven, so when another standards body turned up and took a look at it, we were able to plug in their standards and produce a customised package with the minimum of software changes.

As well as the management standards, the software also ended up supporting Further Education (FENTO) and Sports (SPRITO) before I left the company due to "managerial differences".

MAPS are still going but, as far as I can see, seem to have concentrated on the further education product.