Why Operational Assessments are Essential to Organizations Today

Organizations everywhere are striving to continuously improve and become more efficient, but how do they know where to start? Conducting an operational assessment is a great way to get a snapshot of how your organization is performing today. Without that clear picture, how could you know where to find opportunities to increase efficiency in the future?

Here are a few reasons why operational assessments are a vital exercise for organizations today:

They Identify Performance Gaps

The gap can be caused by one of two things:

1. The organization is underperforming against expected productivity, or
2. The organization is meeting their desired performance goals but is looking to strategically grow in the future.

In either case, identifying the gap leads an organization to understand what problems need to be solved and what needs to change for goals to be achieved.

They Better Prepare Organizations for Change

In order to prepare a readiness plan for an upcoming change within an organization, leaders need to identify the size of the gap between current and future state. This gives visibility to the scale of the change (systems, process, skills, knowledge, etc.) that you’re going to undertake. This information will help you understand the best way to socialize the upcoming changes to those that are affected.

They Help Remind Leaders of Their Impact

It’s easy for leaders to get lost in the day-to-day grind and lose sight of the primary responsibilities to the organization. Operational assessments require that all key contributors to performance (resources, capabilities, business processes, etc.…) are analyzed so that the goals of the organization are better aligned with the day to day actions of leadership. This helps leaders prioritize their focus on decisions that are more beneficial to the organization as a whole.

By analyzing and understanding the current operational results you’ll be better prepared to solve the problems that are identified during the assessment. Now that we have a better understanding of the value of an operational assessment, stay tuned to discover what an operational assessment looks like to us.