STS

Site Visit Guide

"Benchmarking is the continuous process of measuring our products, services, and practices against our toughest competitors or those companies renowned as the leaders. It is a tool to identify, establish, and achieve standards of excellence- standards based on the realities of the marketplace. Benchmarking forces an external focus to becoming competitive and often points the way to "breakthrough" thinking that leads to quantum improvements in performance."

Pete Landry

Shaping the Visit Objectives

Before selecting a site, it is critical to understand your intentions and objectives for visitation since this will enable you to sieve out the site to best accommodate your needs. Why are you wanting to visit? What do you hope to gain? What will you do with the information you receive? are all questions to take seriously as you work to discover your objective.

Your team can profit from a well planned site visit in many ways. By acquiring and exchanging information with top-performing companies you can further develop your understanding of change and collect ideas that may be applicable in your organization. Understanding the goal of visitation will permit the team to explore beyond the surface to examine the underlying processes that organizations employ to develop their products or services.

Visits to innovative work sites may encourage organizations to:

•	Discover need and possibility of change

•	Build enthusiasm and commitment for change

•	Identify leading business practices and approaches used by other companies

•	Share and collect information

•	Examine own organizational practices, beliefs and make comparisons

•	Create a series of exercises that ask "why?"

•	Gain clarity about change efforts in leading organizations with regard to: strategic issues (why and how they started, required resources, and results); process of change (how they did it); specific features of the new organization ( pay systems, teams, process improvement, leadership, etc.); future trends (what will the criteria be for the future?)

•	Develop a sense of direction the change effort should take; establish ambitious goals for the future

Choosing The Site

Once objectives are clear and the team understands the purpose of the site visit, it is time to choose a visitation site. It is important to give thought to the potential candidates that may match your benchmarking goals. In searching for benchmarking partners, consider the specific functions or processes you hope to examine. You will want to choose organizations that are known to be companies that use the best practices available today in given areas or are highly respected for certain areas of design.

While team members may easily identify with organizations that are similar to their own in terms of product, performance, size, design, functions, and other areas, you may discover very valuable learnings from organizations outside your own industry.

Understanding Your Own Organization

An examination of one's own business practices prior to any visitation will help team members discover the differences in their own company's practices with those judged to be best-in-class . It is important to have a full understanding of your own activities, for without that, information gathered from other sites will be of little value.

"Without a full grasp of your own activities, gathering data from other companies is useless, because you have no way of making any comparisons"

Brenda Sumberg, Director of Quality for Motorola University

Preparing for the Visit

To ensure a successful site visit the team must prepare for the visit, making sure that details are managed. Some possible steps might be:

Select a Coordinator

You may want to choose or self-select someone to represent your organization, who will be the liaison with the visiting sites. This person would need to make contact with proper organizations and make arrangements for your visitation group.

Communicate Your Visit Requirements

To give the visiting site an opportunity to understand and prepare for your visit, it will be important to contact the appropriate person at the site to convey your objectives and expectations of the visit.

•	Communicate your agenda: Share your visit objectives while outlining the various issues and questions you will bring. You may want to send a prepared list of questions you may want to discuss.

•	Discuss the varieties of people you want to speak to at the site, to include a fair representation of people from different functions.

•	Make arrangements for a tour of the work related areas, expressing the desire to talk with employees as they perform their typical work.

•	Inquire as to the requirements the site may have for the visiting team related to the environment. Ask about necessary safety equipment, appropriate dress for the visitors, as well as any special provisions that may be necessary.

•	Request preliminary site information that can be sent in advance of your visit to help save time while on site. This may help answer many questions prior to the visit and allow the visitation team to focus on important findings.

Preparing Questions for the Site Visit

Benchmarking is basically a series of exercises that ask "WHY?" For site visitation to be a value-adding activity it is vital to understand what questions need to be asked while on site. The team will want to focus on many areas of investigation during the visit that will support the goals and purpose, so it will be important to concentrate on developing questions that will elicit valuable information.

The following categories of issues may be helpful when designing questions:

•	Background Knowledge

Retrieving information about the site while identifying the transformation efforts.

•	Transformation Processes

Discovering change processes during discovery, design, implementation and

renewal phases

•	Organizational Practices

How is the organization designed and what are the characteristics of the new

design?

•	Outcomes and Results

Is the organization working well?

How To Write Questions

Understanding what you really want to find out will help you write questions. Try to keep questions simple and focused on one issue at a time. Questions should be designed in a way to really explore and inquire into the organization's processes and change efforts. When gathering information from another site prepare questions that will allow you to engage in conversations that will enable real learning instead of just getting answers.

Gathering Data on Site

How will the team members gather information and carry out objectives while visiting a site? Make sure the team agrees upon the aim of the visit and how needs are going to get met. It will be important to divide the responsibilities and decide on how things will be managed before the visit.

The following list of suggestions may help the team gather necessary information:

•	Listen for facts as well as attitudes

•	Stay focused on the people on site and their experiences. Do not get caught up in sharing your stories or agreeing/disagreeing with experiences.

•	Collect information as a team, share as the day proresses.

•	Capture learnings in a way that is meaningful to you.

•	Stay positive and give attention to the visiting group.

•	Don't solicit suggestions from other group, stay focused on gathering information.

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Reporting The Learnings

The object of this phase it to understand and share the information collected. Both quantitative and qualitative data needs to be analyzed to make comparisons. The visiting team members will need to work to come to an agreement on the collected facts. Pull out the important learnings your group experienced. Discuss how your organization can utilize the experiences and improve upon your own processes. Stay open to ways you can use your findings. Record the experience in a way that will enable future references.