Achievement Management
Do we have everything that must happen for this result to be achieved, and will all of it actually come together?
Organizations already have strategy, plans, project management, operations systems, KPIs, dashboards, meetings and communications.
The practical substitute for one authoritative representation is all of those mechanisms plus human effort to interpret and connect them.
The missing layer is a maintained representation of the required achieved states and the causal relationships among them.
What Achievement Management Is
Shared Performance is Achievement Management: establishing and continuously managing what must be achieved, how it must come together, and whether it actually will.
Achievement Management is the management category and discipline focused on establishing, managing and improving what must be achieved and how it comes together.
The accountable leader needs confidence, early enough to act, that all required Achievements are identified, owned, causally connected and progressing together.
The Authoritative Representation
At its foundation is the governed, current representation of what must be achieved, who owns it, how it causally comes together and whether it remains capable of success.
Strategy documents and systems contain fragments of the answer, but they do not by themselves constitute the complete, governed representation.
The representation is maintained as a living management system rather than a one-time plan or workshop artifact.
The Achievement Is the Management Object
An Achievement is something that must become true.
It is not a task, a project schedule, a meeting action or simply a KPI.
A usable Achievement can include a definition or deliverable, ownership, dates, status, indicators, causal relationships, supporting information, security, history, attachments and linked execution systems.
Causation Is Non-Negotiable
A relationship is not valuable merely because two records are associated.
The management question is whether one Achievement contributes to, enables, supports, constrains or otherwise causally affects another Achievement that must be realized.
The purpose of relationships is to show how Achievements come together.
Achievement Management Preserves How Work Gets Done
Existing systems remain valuable and can continue to manage much of how work gets done.
Existing ERP, CRM, project, workflow, development, collaboration and other systems can remain in place and be linked to the Achievements they help deliver.
Shared Performance manages what must be achieved, why, how those Achievements causally come together, and whether they will.
Establish. Assess. Improve.
Establish, Assess and Improve is the management operating cycle.
Establish
Create the initial authoritative representation: identify Achievements, define what and why, establish ownership and causal relationships, and connect supporting evidence and necessary context.
Assess
Evaluate quality, sufficiency, causal completeness, risk, status, dependencies, evidence and the ability of the representation to come together.
Improve
Correct gaps, improve definitions and relationships, intervene on risks, reprioritize and continuously improve both the representation and achievement performance.
Why It Matters
Achievement Management shifts management from primarily monitoring activity and lagging results to managing whether the intended result is still capable of happening while there is time to influence it.
It supports earlier detection of failure or structural weakness, fewer dependency surprises and cross-functional misses, and better allocation of leadership attention and scarce resources.
The most important measurable value proposition is to increase the percentage of what the organization sets out to achieve that it actually achieves.
The System of Achievement and SP Attain
The System of Achievement is the management system combining the discipline, process, services and supporting technology required to manage achievement.
SP Attain is the software platform that sustains the System of Achievement.
An Achievement Network is the causal/contribution structure of Achievements showing what supports or contributes to what.