Five Key Principles of Corporate Performance Management

Chapter 7. Principle 4: Improve Performance

	The game isn’t over till it’s over.
	--YOGI BERRA

Exhibit 7.1 summarizes Principle 4 Best Practices, and the case studies provide rich content to support them. The Crown case study provides both the Crown-specific best practices and expands discussion on the normative Principle 4 best practices learned from the collective companies researched.

Table 7.1. Principle 4 Best Practice Summary

Best Practice	Description
Prioritize improvement projects	Identify and prioritize strategic and operational initiatives to improve organization’s performance along financial, customer or constituent, process, and people dimensions.
Leverage customer facing processes	Develop and exercise customer and constituent processes to understand and recalibrate processes around changing customer needs. Gather customer and competitor intelligence using regular customer surveys, focus groups, call centers, quality function deployment, and related methods and approaches.
Leverage process improvement methods	Design and maintain an ongoing process improvement and problem-solving program based on Six Sigma black belt or green belt, or Lean methods and tools to identify and eliminate root causes of issues.
Realize value from benchmarking processes	Leverage benchmarking and comparative methods to identify and regularly improve core and support processes. APQC has developed a process ...