This is an illustrative takeaway guide to accompany the Toolkit resource Key Principles for Managing by Results. It suggests ways that different kinds of work might be compartmentalised and measured, and which can be adapted for different kinds of work in the business. Types of work form management by results

Type of work

Characteristics

Examples

Measures of output (examples)

Quantity

Quality

Process

Work that is part of a regular well-defined process, and where the output at any stage is usually clearly countable

  • most forms of production
  • data processing
  • volume telephony work
  • many aspects of finance
  • many aspects of sales
  • customer fulfilment work
  • Number of items produced
  • Amount of information processed
  • Number of calls handled
  • Number of transactions
  • Number of items delivered
  • Meeting required standards
  • Accuracy
  • Customer satisfaction with process
   

Project

Project-type work encompasses anything that can be seen as a one-off collection of work tasks with a well-defined budget, purpose, scope, timescale and result.

  • delivering a product or set of services to clients
  • bidding for work
  • building something
  • creating marketing materials
  • running a campaign
  • implementing change projects
  • Production of deliverables to time and budget
  • Number of component deliverables handled per person/team
  • Quality of deliverables
  • Quality of contributions of project team members
  • Degree to which project meets objectives
  • Value for money
   

Case/Account

Work with individual clients to deliver a service, solve problems or monitor the delivery of a service

  • Working on commercial client account
  • Social work case work
  • Legal case work
  • Resolving employee disputes
  • Number of services or products delivered to client
  • Number of elements delivered by each team member or case worker
  • Number of cases handled overall
  • Balance between straightforward and complex cases in workload
  • Customer satisfaction with service in the case
  • Efficiency and effectiveness of case/account handling
  • Meeting objective standards (e.g. legal standard; government-set targets)
  • Success in meeting or exceeding billing targets
  • Success in resolving problems
   

Innovation

Coming up with new ideas, strategies, insights, designs, modifications to designs.

  • designing new product
  • creating new policy
  • writing an article or a speech
  • preparing a presentation
  • producing marketing strategy
  • scoping smarter working
  • Number of articles, speeches, presentations produced
  • Contribution by team members to producing new strategy, product, etc
  • Amount of research, analysis, evidence gathering, reporting as contributions to innovation
  • Speed of response to requests for new materials
  • Quality of materials delivered
  • Ability to take new idea or new product/prototype forward
  • Robustness and insightfulness of evidence and analysis
 

Support

Supporting the work of other people, more in a reactive and as-needed way rather than as part of a process or project

  • P.A. / secretarial work
  • Technical support
  • Reception work
  • Number of people supported and with what services
  • Number of sites or equipment supported
  • Number of requests responded to
  • Speed and efficiency of response
  • Accuracy
  • Being proactive in spotting issues
  • Ability to coordinate functioning of team
  • Organisational skill

Managerial

Managing, coordinating and supervising the work of others

  • Managing or coordinating teams
  • Managing people (effectiveness, collaboration, skills development)
  • Managing resources and budgets
  • Managing results
  • Mentoring, coaching
  • Output of individuals and teams managed
  • Personal output as individual, if applicable
  • Amount of people management work
  • Contributions to meeting corporate objectives
  • Success in managing workloads and setting and meeting targets
  • Quality of output of teams
  • Quality of reporting to senior management
  • Success in resolving problems
  • Quality of people management
  • Feedback from 360o appraisals
  • Quality of resource management