MRO Today - PPDP benchmarking

PPDP Benchmarking

by Dr. Robert A. Kemp, Ph.D., C.P.M.

Thus far this series of articles on creating and using your Personal Professional Development Program (PPDP), has defined and discussed the process used to develop your PPDP and broad sources for professional development programs and topics. I also provided a set of four rules and five guidelines to support your PPDP and ensure that you are ready for your unique professional future in global supply management.

Now in this final article I will provide a set of metrics to measure your progress and benchmark your program against others in our profession.

We know that benchmarking is a sound and very practical program for business activities. We can also use benchmarking as a sound tool to identify concepts and metrics to measure and evaluate progress for your professional development program. Our plans ought to be supported by appropriate metrics and benchmarks based on the profession and our organization’s strategies.

Some will argue benchmarks in our PPDP are difficult to develop and use because the programs are so different and difficult to evaluate. Even so, by thinking out of the box and working creatively to solve the problem, we can find the similarities and concepts to identify metrics and build our benchmark system.

Here is a list of topics or concepts that we can use as metrics. You also should use other lists that are available and appropriate. We want a benchmark system that fits you and your organizational situation. These potential benchmarks are listed without regard to order or importance. As our positions and careers place varying degrees of importance on different metrics, each of us must arrange the metrics in terms of importance to our own PPDP and organization.

1. Participation, leadership and contribution in professional organizations
2. Number of years of professional membership in appropriate professional organizations
3. Current professional certifications applicable to position and career
4. Years of employment in the supply management profession
5. Years of formal education completed
6. Number of business courses completed in degree programs
7. College degrees – list them all and the year of completion
8. Supply management degree
9. Annual organizational budget for PPDP compared to CAPS or other benchmarks
10. Annual personal budget for PPDP compared to others in the organization
11. Overall college grade point average
12. College grade point for business courses
13. Total number of hours of applicable non-academic seminar hours completed
14. Number of non-academic seminar hours completed in the current year compared to the number of hours scheduled for the current year
15. College credit hours for field-related courses completed this year
16. Number of planned PPDP hours or units scheduled for this year
17. Number of planned PPDP hours or units completed this year
18. Number of programs that required major research or work projects to be completed
19. Number of programs that required testing and grading to be completed
20. Average test scores or grade average for courses completed that included testing
21. Do you have a long-range PPDP tied to strategic needs
22. Is PPDP progress in line with the strategic plan
23. Annual leadership evaluation scores compared to supply management average
24. Change in annual leadership evaluation scores compared to previous year

You may now make your PPDP scorecard by using the data in the five steps and three stages presented in previous articles which are available at the MRO Today Web site www.mrotoday.com. The data required for your PPDP will be stored in many organizational files. Hopefully, much of it will also be in your personal career files. Regardless of where the data is located, we need to collect it into our PPDP. More importantly, we need to complete our vision for our future career and identify what we must do to maximize our abilities in the supply management profession in the future.

The steps described earlier outline how we can accomplish our research and complete this process. This last step develops our benchmarks and metrics to measure progress.

No one can guarantee our professional success or that we will accomplish our individual PPDP, but I firmly believe that the future belongs to those that aggressively plan and improve their professional abilities. My personal advice is to accept that we must get better every year and work diligently to meet that strategic requirement.

Robert Kemp is a consultant and the former president of the Institute for Supply Management. If you have a procurement question, contact Coach Kemp: Phone: 515-221-2503; E-mail: kempr@mchsi.com