About Management Factors

Management Factors is a professional services firm with experienced professionals from a variety of backgrounds.

Our mission is to help organizations improve and achieve their objectives effectively, efficiently and at the lowest possible cost. We accomplish our mission by helping organizations manage the "Critical Success Factors"

Success factors as a guiding business concept were first introduced by D. Ronald Daniel in a 1961 Harvard Business Review (HBR) article. The purpose of the article was to highlight the types of information needed to support top management activities. He said that an organization’s information system should be selective and center on providing detail around three to six ‘success factors’ that help the organization achieve success.

Key Critical Success Factors Concept

Critical Success Factors (CSFs) are the limited number of areas in which satisfactory results will ensure successful competitive performance for the individual, department, or organization. CSFs are the few key areas where "things must go right" for the business to flourish and for managers' goals to be attained.
Source: Jonh F. Rockhard,
Harvard Business Review

The CSF method outlined by Rockart has primarily been successful at organizations to support planning processes and communicating the role of information technology to senior management. The method outlined by Rockart includes conducting two to three CSF interviews in separate sessions by a trained consultant with an organization’s management team. The first interview focuses on identifying a limited number of CSFs and the underlying organization goals related to the CSF. A discussion around the measures that can be used to support the CSF also takes place in the first session. The second interview session is used to review the identified CSFs and have an in-depth discussion around measures to support the CSFs. Sometimes a third session is used in the process to obtain final agreement on CSFs and the measures to support the CSFs. CSFs are important for an organization because they;

Support the planning process
Communicate the role of IT
Assist in prioritizing IT investment decisions
Guide managers on understanding where best to focus their attention on helping the organization be successful
Promote structured analysis processes
Measures are crucial to the CSF method because they verify performance for an identified CSF by providing specific, standard information.
Performance measures may be either qualitative or quantitative in nature. CSFs are first identified during the CSF method interview process by discussing the manager’s underlying goals and/or the organizations goals.
Specific measurements needed to support the organization’s identified CSFs can be defined after the CSFs have been identified. Additional interviews may be needed to further finalize performance measurement criteria.

The CSF method provides a view of an organization from the manager’s operation perspective at a certain point in time. The measures to support the CSFs are very different than, for example, the financial measures provided to support a public company. The five CSF sources are:

Organization’s industry
Organization’s competitive strategy and industry position
Environmental factors
Temporal factors
Managerial position

There are other factors an organization should consider when developing its performance measurement process.

Leadership – Engaged, sustained senior leadership involvement is essential to developing and executing a performance measurement process.

Conceptual Framework – It is helpful for an organization to develop a structure for its performance measurement process that is clearly understood by everyone in the organization and that can be used to gather performance measurement data.

Communications – An organization’s performance measurement process should include a communication strategy to disseminate information about performance measurement to all internal and external stakeholders.

Accountability – An organization’s performance measurement process must clearly define success for all employees within the organization and outline roles they play in helping the organization achieve its mission, vision and strategy.

Provide information - A performance measurement process must provide an organization’s leadership with information directly related to its mission, vision and strategy. This information should be used to assist decision makers within the organization in understanding progress made toward achieving its goals or identify improvement opportunities.

Compensation, recognition and rewards – Performance evaluations should be directly tied to specific measures of success.

Continuous improvement opportunity – A successful performance measurement process identifies continuous improvement opportunities for an organization to continue to achieve its mission, vision and strategy.

Share results and progress – An organization’s performance measurement results should be communicated to its employees, customers, stakeholders, vendors, and suppliers on regular, timely basis. This can be done using its internet or intranet site, newsletters, electronic broadcasts, etc. and is crucial for all stakeholders to understand progress made by the organization to achieve its goals.

Keep it simple – Performance measurements used by an organization should be clearly tied to its mission, vision and strategy. The measurements should be understood by all personnel and stakeholders and focus on the organization’s key tasks it uses to achieve it mission, vision and strategy.

Systematize - An organization should use its performance measurement process to help identify improvement opportunities to turn core business functions into a standardized process.

Management Factors focuses on these issues for its customers benefit using a proven methodology and modern management disciplines throughout its practice.