Dynamic Performance Management

This book explores how to design and implement planning & control (P&C) systems that can help organizations to manage their growth and restructuring processes in a sustainability perspective. The book is not designed to enable the reader to become an experienced system dynamics modeler; rather, it aims to develop the reader’s capabilities to design and implement performance management systems by using a system dynamics approach. More specifically, the book shows how to develop system dynamics models that can better support an understanding of:

-What is organizational performance and how to frame and measure it;

-How to identify and map the processes underlying performance;

-How to design and implement a dynamic performance management system and link it to strategic planning;

-How to tie strategic resource dynamics to processes and performance indicators;

-How to link strategic resources, and performance indicators to responsibility and incentive systems.

Using a dynamic performance management approach can improve an organization’s capability to understand and manage the forces driving performance over time, as well as set goals and objectives that may properly and selectively gauge results and match them to the key responsibility areas in the planning process. The dynamic performance management approaches covered in the book are beneficial to performance management analysts, enabling them to frame their professional field within the broader context of the system. The book also includes numerous case studies and dynamic performance management models for providing examples of how dynamic performance management works in practice. In addition, a literature review is included to provide a guideline for further improvements to those readers who wish to develop relevant, specific, and detailed system dynamics modeling skills and to establish the foundation for teaching system dynamics applied to performance management in organizational and inter-organizational contexts. This is particularly relevant for graduate students who have taken system dynamics courses and need to apply their own skills to business and public management.

Carmine Bianchi is Professor of Business & Public Management at the University of Palermo (Italy), where is the scientific coordinator of CED⁴ System Dynamics Group. He is the director of the Doctoral level program in “Model Based Public Planning, Policy Design, & Management”, and of the Master level program in Public Management.

Professor Bianchi is member of the Steering Committee of the “European Master in System Dynamics”, a joint degree among the Universities of Palermo, Nijmegen (the Netherlands), Bergen (Norway), and Lisbon (Portugal). This is an “Erasmus Mundus” funded program, sponsored by the European Commission.

He has published in numerous academic and professional journals. He also serves on the Scientific Committee of various academic publications.

Professor Bianchi has an extensive international research and consulting experience with public and private sector organizations. Such activities consist in the design of policies and the outline of programs linking strategy and implementation. Consulting and education projects that Prof. Bianchi has undertaken cover: strategic planning and control, performance management and reporting, as well as System Dynamics modeling for performance improvement and crisis prevention (Dynamic Performance Management).

In the last decade, Professor Bianchi has been strengthening an international network related to “Dynamic Performance Management”. He has been collaborating with Universities throughout the world, ranging from Europe (Bergen, Norway; Nijmegen, The Netherlands; St. Gallen, Switzerland; KTH, Stockholm, Sweden), to Australasia (Top Education Institute, Sydney; Multimedia University and National University of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur; NAPA - Hanoi; Rangsit University, Bangkok; Universitas Indonesia, Jakarta; National Academy of Public Administration – NAPA, Hanoi), and America (University of Campinas - UNICAMP, Brazil).

In the USA, Professor Bianchi has collaborated extensively with the School of Government of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. More recently he has undertaken projects with the Center for Human Resource Management State, Stony Brook University, with the School of Public Affairs at the Baruch College, New York, and with the College of Public Affairs at the University of Baltimore.

He has been also visiting professor at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy, University at Albany (USA), at Top Education Institute, Sydney (Australia), and at Unicamp, Faculty of Technology, Limeira (Brazil).

He has also run professional workshops in: Africa (Tripoli, Tunis), Australasia (Bangkok, Brisbane, Hanoi, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Singapore), Europe (Istanbul, London, Milan, San Gallen, Stockholm), and Latin America (Buenos Aires – Argentina, Brasilia, Sao Paolo – Brazil, Colima – Mexico).