Practice Management

Technical Excelllence

In many professional businesses, high technical excellence is taken for granted - we assume that having it is "table stakes" for competing.

However, it's not a trivial issue to ask whether and how a firm goes about ensuring that its employees in fact meet high standards of technical expertise, especially in a world where companies tend to signal that revenue generation is a more pressing (if not more important) topic.

Who is best positioned in a professional organization to judge an employee's technical quality? I assume that it might be that person's supervisor, but there could be some built-in conflicts: what if the supervisor is under economic pressure to meet group goals and hence compromise (a little) degrees of technical excellence?

I'm curious about your experience as to how your firm or company goes about ensuring technical excellence. Is it some combination of:

1. Training
2. On-the-job supervision
3. Peer Review Processes at the Job Level
4. Annual Performance Appraisals
5. Reward schemes

Or something else?

Full post as published by Passion, People and Principles on November 21, 2007 (boomark / email).