Quality Improvement and Performance Improvement: Different Means to the Same End? |
Origins
Although PI and QI arise from different beginnings, both take a systems view. ISPI defines HPT/PI as: "Human performance technology is a set of methods and procedures, and a strategy for solving problems, for realizing opportunities related to the performance of people. It can be applied to individuals, processes, and organizations. It is, in reality, a systematic combination of three fundamental processes: performance analysis, cause analysis, and intervention selection."2
HPT has deep roots in human resources, instructional design, and training, and draws on many fields, including systems theory, learning psychology and behaviorism, information technology, feedback systems, organizational development, analytical systems, ergonomics, human factors, and psychometrics.3 PI grew out of the realization that poor job performance seldom is due solely to the performer's lack of skills and knowledge, but usually to other factors in the system.
PI is based on the theoretical framework of HPT, a systematic method based on data, aimed ultimately at improving human performance by addressing the gap between the present state and the desired state. Its foundation is the belief that to improve human performance, one must manage the performance improvement system, which must be the core of an organization's human resource efforts.4
Progressive companies in private industry have practiced both PI and QI since the '70s. Performance improvement is helping to change the widespread notion that all performance problems are best addressed by training. Traditionally, management viewed poor performance as a lack of knowledge or skills, without regard for a variety of internal and external determinants of performance, such as motivation, incentives, environmental factors, resources, feedback, coaching, supervisory support, and others. This mentality leads managers to think that workplace performance problems can be "fixed" by training, so training became a panacea for those problems but rarely solves them. Even when training is required, it alone is often insufficient to improve job performance ("training transfer"). Without certain supports present in the workplace, performance may improve for a short period following training, and then erode.
Quality assurance (QA) and its component, QI, originated in engineering and manufacturing where systems theory, statistical process control, and continuous quality improvement were combined with general management methods. Both QA and QI have long since been adopted and adapted by healthcare systems in many developed countries.
2 International Society for Performance Improvement. 2001.
3 M. Rosenberg, W. Coscarelli, and C. Hutchison. 1992. "The Origins and Evolution of the Field" in Stolovitch and Keeps, eds., Handbook of Human Performance Technology. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
4 International Society for Performance Improvement, 2001.