AssessmentWorld is adding another value-add
service bouquet to its existing assessment instruments. Based on
extensive industry experience in organizational development (OD) related
projects, its practitioners are now actively utlising the company's unique
diagnostic instruments such as surveys and 360 degree performance measurements
in order to enhance its OD consulting offering.
"Organization development is a
system-wide application of behavioral science knowledge to the planned
development and reinforcement of organizational strategies, structures, and
processes for improving an organization's effectiveness." - Cummings and
Worley, "Organization Development and Change", Sixth Edition,
South-Western Publishing, 1997, p.2.
An Organization Development
practitioner is to an organization as a physician is to a human body. The
practitioner "diagnoses" (or discovers) the most important priorities
to address in the organization, suggests a change-management plan, and then
guides the organization through the necessary change.
Today, many
OD (Organizational Development)-based survey practitioners are viewed as truly
strategic agents for organizational change and improvement. Although there are
several different approaches one could use to categorize the ways in which
technology has affected OD practice over the past decade, in three major areas,
one being: quantitative data-based assessment
tools and techniques (e.g., organizational surveys,360-degree feedback,
selection tests). First, it should come as no surprise that IT, and particularly
Internet and Web related applications, have significantly affected the way in
which OD practitioners and their clients work with quantitative
assessment-based tools and techniques. Although survey feedback has been a
cornerstone of OD practice for years, it has been the advent of new technology
(i.e., interactive voice response [IVR] units, personal computers, and finally
the Web itself) that has enabled surveys to significantly improve their overall
capacity to drive organizational diagnosis, development, and change. Compared
with older, paper-based approaches, technology has significantly improved:
• the
turnaround time and therefore relevancy of any survey, feedback, or selection
data that is collected;
• the
breadth and depth of the target audience or population that can be assessed
(assuming Internet access is not an issue, which it can be in certain types of
organizations);
• the
adaptive nature of the assessment tool itself (e.g., follow-up questions can be
more easily and seamlessly added based on various responses to other questions,
demographics, or combinations of responses)
At
AssessmentWorld we specialise in the above areas of OD work.
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