We have found that the observation skill is key for the performance improvement professional. If you can spend some time doing the work you are investigating, so much the better. You may be tempted to interview the worker or the supervisor, or review job descriptions and assume you have a sense of what the work entails. However, we caution you about the limitations of this approach. When you ask people about their work, they tell you what they think the job is or how it has been explained to them. When you observe them doing the work, you will see what is being done and hear what is being said—both process and practice. The combination of researching the work and then seeing it done will help you identify the critical processes and practices for the work.

Before we go further, let’s consider some of the questions you may have about processes and practices:

A process is a series of actions or “a series of planned activities that convert a given input into a desired output” (Rummler, 2004, p. 167). Further, a “process is a construct or artifice for organizing work” so it:

A critical process issue is “a problem or opportunity related to the performance of a specific process. Examples include ‘excessive time to get a new product to market’ and ‘deteriorating customer satisfaction with time to receive orders.’ The critical process issue must subsequently be refined to a specific gap between current and desired results” (Rummler, 2004, p. 163).

For the performance improvement professional, practices are patterns of behavior and often represent the values side of an organization. We see this as part of an organization’s culture. For years, many of us with engineering and behavioral backgrounds found the concept of organizational culture difficult to characterize and observe. There was no standard definition for it and, until the 1980s, culture referred to nationalities rather than organizations.