Editorial

Citation

Burgess, T. and Heap, J. (2011), "Editorial", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 60 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijppm.2011.07960baa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Volume 60, Issue 2

This issue covers a constellation of current management issues. Apart from performance, the topics covered touch on supply chains, balanced scorecard, industrial clusters, project management, collaborative working to name some of the more prominent topics in the five academic and one reflective practice paper in this issue. The contexts of the papers range from the BRIC economies; jewellery manufacture, textiles, to IT; and SMEs to large companies. Varied methods are deployed – qualitative and quantitative approaches – focus groups, interviews, on-line questionnaire surveys and analytical approaches. These factors once again demonstrate the eclectic mix of papers published in the journal that reflect the universality of our interests in performance management.

The first paper, by Anbanandam, Banwet and Shankar, uses questionnaire data drawn from 35 garment producers in India to examine the link between supply chain collaboration and performance. A strong relationship is found between the two factors in that high collaboration is linked to high performance. Supply chain collaboration is measured in an innovative way involving a graph theoretic approach where respondents assess the impact of five enablers on their level of collaboration with partners and the interdependence of these enablers. Performance is measured by company personnel self-reporting their achievement on ten key items split into four dimensions of fulfilment, inventory, responsiveness and quality.

Authors Agostino and Arnaboldi in their paper aim to understand how the motives for implementing the balanced scorecard and the implementation approach adopted affect the structure of the BSC and how it is used. They apply a multiple case study method to seven, large Italian companies and underpin their theorising with an institutional theory perspective. Their basic data arise from interviews with senior managers and company archival data. Their findings show the heterogeneity of practice in that different reasons for adoption and different implementation approaches result in different BSC structures and styles of use.

The third paper, by Oprime, Tristão and Pimenta, investigates relationships between organisational factors, cluster characteristics and the environment in a Brazilian industrial cluster of manufacturers in the jewellery sector. Using data obtained by interviewing owner/managers of SMEs, the authors identify two groups within the cluster that differ in terms of management style and approach. One group of companies has more structured management and is better able to support the operations, product development and the company as a whole.

Lacerda, Ensslin and Ensslin concentrate on performance measurement in the project management context, particularly IT projects in Brazil. They apply the principles of multi-criteria decision making to the specification of success and to the evaluation of the potential performance of IT projects. This allows the impact of improvement activities on project success to be gauged before execution and ultimately aids high achieving projects to be selected from the portfolio of potential projects. The paper includes an example case showing the application of their method.

In the fifth paper Yin, Qin and Holland develop a method to measure and improve the collaborative performance of a design team. In the final analysis they believe the quality of the design that is output from the design process comes down to team performance. The context they investigate is industrial design within the UK. The authors identify five key dimensions of design performance comprised of, in total, 25 detailed measures which emerge from their process of evaluating and establishing the more important contributors to the dimensions. Their method relies on a substantial literature review, focus groups and questionnaire survey of designers. They put forward a process for using their method which they argue will improve the quality of the collaborative design process.

Finally in the Reflective Practice paper, Antony collates opinions from a number of leading academics and practitioners on the differences between the Lean and Six Sigma approaches to performance improvement, suggesting that the key differences are that Lean emphasises speed and waste, whereas Six Sigma concentrates on, and promotes, process review to identify and remove variation and defects.

Tom Burgess, John Heap