Benchmarking

So I came across a new term today whist looking through Reader 7 and that is benchmarking.

"Benchmarking is the search for industry best practices that lead to superior performance"
- Robert Camp, logistics engineer who initiated Xerox's benchmarking program.

It is a way to compare how your own business is doing with some of the best organisations out there. The aim is to learn to how to achieve this great standard and then set out to implement it in your own company. It is a good way to inform top level management how the company is doing, measures how successful you are being, what is working and what needs improvement. In a theatre setting it would be a good way to see what has worked, what hasn't and whether the audience is changing over time.

This made me think about what if our theatre had engaged in some benchmarking of their own. It seems that it needs to be a continuous process. you have to understand the way your company is currently operating and look for the best organisation in the business to compare it against. You then need a method to collect the data and a way to implement changes in the problems that emerge. We could have done some benchmarking on the financial aspects as well as management processes. For example, housing all our production staff as they were not from the local area was money wasted. If you compare to other entertainment venues around the beach, none house their production staff.

I feel that although the theatre is now closed benchmarking might still be useful in my inquiry to compare how we were operating and  running, what were our management practices like and compare this to other theatres. This should help me to uncover what were the weaknesses and the areas that needed improvement, which helps to discover what went wrong.