Shannon Hennessy [Archive.org URL]

Everyone loves to hate on benchmarks, and I can understand where that comes from. There are people who have deep scars from watching benchmarks get misused and from trying to compare one company to another in a way that they aren’t similar.

That said, I have not seen anything be as effective as benchmarks in triggering some hard questions, such as “Why does it take 50 percent more resources in your organization to do an activity that’s quite similar to a peer?” Or, “How is it that this process takes a peer company 30 percent as much time as it does for you?”

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