This article presents a model developed to motivate and measure quality performance in information systems staff. This approach, referred to as team-based assessment (TBA), is founded on organizational effectiveness and quality principles. The team-based assessment approach emphasizes two main goals -- to maintain a customer orientation and to promote an atmosphere for employee development and growth -- while ensuring individual and team accountability. To assess the achievement of these goals, a formal system of measurements has been developed. The approach encompasses five critical areas: product quality, staff development, customer outreach, administrative efficiency, and fiscal responsibility. This model is currently in use at several large government contract-based organizations.

MOTIVATING EMPLOYEES TO PERFORM to their potential within a team setting is often difficult to accomplish. With an increased emphasis on quality and performance in team settings, organizations are looking for ways to evaluate and motivate both individuals and teams (Hefley, 1996; Humphrey, 1997). Total quality management has received mixed results in manufacturing organizations. One of the reasons cited for mixed results is the difficulty in motivating both individual and team performance. Implementing total quality management principles in service-based organizations is often difficult, given the lack of "physical" output provided by the organization. Concentration on total quality management in professional services organizations has centered on task areas such as standards, procedures, education, and policies (Mogilensky, 1989; Badiru, 1990). Within the past decade, the principles of total quality management have been applied to information systems (Curtis, 1995; Cortada, 1995; McGuire, 1996; Stylianou, 1997; and Major, 1998).

Little has been written, however, on measures that promote improving team performance while maintaining individual accountability. This article presents a case study of a professional quality management method developed by a systems developer organization specializing in federal government contracts that has received numerous awards for the quality of its professionals. This method presents measures that address both individual and team performance.

The organization has over 3,600 systems professionals and management that support approximately 200 contracts from over 26 office locations throughout the United States. Revenues are close to $200 million for the fiscal year, and continue to rise each year, the result of growth in existing contracts and new awards. Key to this growth are the principles and management approach guiding the organization.

The organization has implemented a management approach, referred to as the team-based assessment approach, which incorporates three principles: maintain a customer orientation, promote an atmosphere for employee empowerment, and implement a clear and understandable system of measures. Thus, the team-based assessment approach is based on key principles of total quality management, applying them to a service organization.

Customer orientation is essential to a total quality management approach, regardless of the product or service provided by the organization. Here, quality is defined by the customer, not the informations systems staff. In a professional services organization, present and future business depends on identifying what quality means to the customer and then satisfying the customer. Thus, customers ultimately define what they need and, therefore, what a quality service is for them. A sophisticated partnership needs to be established with the organization's customers to form the development team. It is essential that the professional services organization understand what each team member can contribute. A customer-oriented organization brings to the team its technical expertise, while the customers brings to the team their programmatic expertise. Together they form a complete project team.

Employee empowerment recognizes that those doing a task know more about that task than anyone else and have more direct control over its quality than anyone else. Therefore, the total quality organization should strive to ensure that its employees performing a task should have increasing responsibility, authority, and accountability for the task's outcome. In the total quality organization, managers become coaches and resources. Managers need strong skills in interpersonal relationships, teamwork, client interface, and project management. Individual team members also need a solid understanding of these concepts as teams substitute for some coordination and decision functions traditionally held by managers. Every individual must become skillful at creating effective and efficient teams.

This approach encompasses five critical areas: product quality, staff development, customer outreach, administrative efficiency, and fiscal responsibility. Exhibit 1 details the factors in these critical areas for two job categories: team leader and senior manager. Each of these principles and critical areas is discussed in the remainder of the article.

Each professional staff member in the organization is evaluated on the five critical areas of responsibility (product quality, stag development, customer outreach, administrative efficiency, and fiscal responsibility). The weight of each factor varies by job category. Exhibit 2 shows sample weightings for senior manager and team leader.

Product quality addresses the employee's direct contribution to producing top-quality products and services that fulfill the needs of customers, both external and internal. (All of the organization's efforts ultimately contribute to the quality of the products and services provided to their clients through constantly building a total quality organization that can deliver those services. In this area, however, the organization considers only those actions which directly touch a product or service.) For professional services staff, product quality accounts for 20 percent of the review for a senior manager and 40 percent of the review for a team leader. The employee contributes directly to product quality by setting the stage for the work of reporting managers.

Senior Manager. Three factors come into play for the senior manager: organizational culture, client interface, and organizational structure.

Team Leader. The team leader is involved with the following factors.

Staff development addresses the employee's contribution to staff development. It accounts for 25 percent of the senior manager review and 35 percent of the team leader review. It includes those activities that directly enhance individual and team effectiveness. This is the long-term work of personal development for each individual and the work of building high-performance teams. It should be noted that each employee has the responsibility for his or her own development and can be evaluated accordingly.

Senior Manager. Four key areas exist for the senior manager: development of reporting staff, team development, personal development, and performance reviews.

Staff development responsibilities for a team leader with task leaders reporting to the employee centers on the development of the task leaders and effective hiring (and firing if necessary) to bring competent staff to the projects. Appropriate appraisal questions might be: Did the employee fill positions in a reasonable time with well-qualified people? Did the employee coach the task leaders in building effective teams? Does the employee know the aspirations of the staff members, and has the employee discussed how each person will need to develop in order to realize their aspirations? Are the employee's task leaders supporting each other effectively?

Customer outreach is an important aspect of the employee's work and accounts for 20 percent of the senior manager review and 10 percent of the team leader review. It includes both maintaining and expanding work with current clients and contributing to efforts to win new clients.

Senior Manager. Three factors are considered for the senior manager: current clients, prospective clients, and proposal work.

Team Leader. In this context, the team leader must address two issues.

Administrative efficiency accounts for 20 percent of the senior manager's review and about 10 percent of the team leader review.

Senior Manager. Direct contribution to administrative efficiency by a senior manager is most likely to be in building administrative procedures within the organization through which staff members handle administrative responsibilities effectively. This aspect considers such areas as training, administrative accuracy, and effective administrative systems.

Team Leader. Ensuring that the administrative work is accurate before it goes forward is critical. The employee may chose to ensure this in a variety of ways -- checking it personally, instructing staff in administrative procedures, or setting up some other checking procedure to ensure its accuracy.

Fiscal responsibility accounts for 15 percent of the senior manager's review and only 5 percent of the team leader's review.

Senior Manager. This area evaluates the quality of a senior manager's financial plan (a separate document) and success in meeting it. If the employee does not have an individual financial plan, it evaluates the employee's contribution to meeting the financial goals of the plan the employee falls under. Two areas are important to the senior manager: financial plan and financial performance.

Team Leader. The team leader's specific fiscal responsibility will depend on which areas the employee has control over that affect the employee's contract's profitability. Typical examples are salary levels for new hires and the ratio of expense dollars to salary dollars. The employee should understand what affects profitability on a particular contract and what the manager's financial goals are. (Other areas such as quality of service strongly affect financial results on award fee contracts where the amount of the fee awarded is determined by the client's rating of the quality of the organization's service. However, only directly controlled financial elements are included here.)

Measures of key processes and outcomes are established to provide reliable indicators of results to those making changes in the organization. There are three areas addressed in the total quality organization's system of measures. First, managers are reviewed based on their retention value or percent staff value lost. Second, the project team (and thus its individual members, to some degree) are reviewed based on a customer satisfaction survey. Third, each professional staff member is evaluated on the five critical areas of responsibilities.

A key measure for management is percent staff value lost. Percent staff value lost is defined as the percent of staff value lost during the current quarter staff attrition. This measure is taken quarterly. This data is tracked by a contract manager, the senior person in charge of a contract. Data is collected from the following personnel actions: new hires, terminations, and performance review dates and ratings. Each staff member is assigned a category. This category does not reflect a grade as to the performance of an employee but applies to the effect on the organization and its clients if the person leaves the company. Also, the organization has an estimate of what percentage of employees should fall into each category. These categories and the percentage of employees that should be included in each category are listed in Exhibit 3.

An employee who is considered key to the organization either makes an important contribution to the corporation through marketing and proposal writing or has a technical knowledge base that is critical to retain within the organization. An employee who is considered a key contact is someone the organization and the client feel is critical to that contract. This category might include first-line and middle-line managers or key technical individuals. If an employee falls into more than one category, the employee is assigned the higher code.

The formula used to calculate percent staff value lost for a quarter is:

Staff Value Lost = Sum of (Category*Performance Value) for each employee lost.(n1)

The factor performance rating requires each employee to be rated in each of the five evaluation areas (i.e., product quality, staff development, customer outreach, administrative efficiency, and fiscal responsibility). These ratings are then weighted according to their importance to the employee's position to calculate an overall rating. Fractional ratings may result. To ensure quality, if an employee's average rating over all five categories is a 2 or below, to remain employed, the employee must successfully complete a performance improvement plan developed by the employee's manager. The ratings are defined in Exhibit 4 and Exhibit 5.

To assess customer satisfaction, the organization performs interviews of its clients. The number of individuals interviewed is determined by the dollar size of the contract. Interviews are conducted with the contract manager, the agency project manager, technical monitors, and end-user managers. These customers are surveyed on four of the five areas of responsibility: product, staff, administration, and outreach as well as on a general set of questions on their perception of management, partnership, and relationships.

Interviews are conducted quarterly and are approximately 20 to 30 minutes in length and include a standard set of written survey questions that are distributed ahead of the scheduled meeting. Who conducts the interview depends on the person being interviewed. Organizational internal control management interviews the contract officer and the agency project manager. A program manager or senior area manager will interview the technical monitors and the end-user managers. The contract manager may delegate a portion of the interviews. In general, a client should be interviewed by the supervisor of the organization's counterpart.

Survey Analysis. Written comments and numerical ratings for each task go to the appropriate task leader for immediate response. The composite numerical average (single number) for the entire contract is tracked in a chart showing trends over time. Contract managers share the information with managers, staff, and clients and explain the results. Because the survey is company-sensitive material, it is not distributed in written form. The composite numerical averages are charted at the division and group levels. Program managers track averages for various subgroups on the contract. These numbers are distributed to the appropriate managers.

This article summarizes a management approach for motivating and evaluating information systems professionals in a professional service organization. It is the author's belief that the particular structure of such a system must mesh with the nature and needs of the individual organization. However, the concepts, purposes, and processes mentioned herein should be widely useful.

The authors are currently collecting data to see how the five factors have affected the retention of contracts over time. The organization retains time sheets (for each employee, even management) that will be linked to performance reviews to determine whether time allocated between factors actually affects performance evaluation, career path progress, and contract retention.