Evolutionary approach to performance management: A case study in a public sector IT support unit

Many of the performance management approaches in the literature appear to align with a top-down approach where measures are derived from mission, vision, and customer and organizational analysis. This paper describes the improvement lifecycle for a department within the Belgian Armed Forces which illustrates an alternative approach to performance management. The department defined formal operationally-focused performance measures after initial success on focused improvement projects. Cycles of learning with these projects and operational measures enabled the department to gain deeper insight about its value-added, which led to the development of a more strategically-focused scorecard. This paper explores how such an evolutionary approach can be effective for organizations with low improvement capability and maturity.