Performance management is a process of ensuring that set of activities and outputs meets an organization's goals in an effective and efficient manner. Performance management can focus on the performance of an organization, a department, an employee, or the processes in place to manage particular tasks. Performance management standards are organized and disseminated by senior leadership at an organization and by task owners, it can include specifying tasks and outcomes of a job, providing timely feedback and coaching, comparing employee's actual performance and behaviors with desired performance and behaviors, instituting rewards, etc. Performance management principles are used most in the workplace and can be applied wherever people interact with their environments to produce desired effects—schools, community meetings, sports teams, health settings, governmental agencies, social events, political settings. Managers use performance management to align company goals with the goals of teams and employees in an effort to increase efficiency and profitability..

Performance management guidelines stipulate the activities and outcomes by which employees and teams are evaluated during performance appraisal. To apply performance management principles, a commitment analysis is completed first to create a mission statement for each job; the mission statement is a job definition in terms of purpose, customers and scope. This analysis is used to determine the continuous key objectives and performance standards for each job position. Following the commitment analysis is the work analysis of a particular job in terms of the reporting structure and job description. If a job description is not available a systems analysis is completed to create a job description; this analysis is used to determine the continuous critical objectives and performance standards for each job. Werner Erhard, Michael C. Jensen, their colleagues developed a new approach to improving performance in organizations, their model is used to stress how the constraints imposed by one's own worldview can impede cognitive abilities that would otherwise be available.

Their work delves into the source of performance, not accessible by mere linear cause-and-effect analysis. They assert that the level of performance people achieve correlates with how work situations occur to them and that language plays a major role in how situations occur to the performer, they assert that substantial gains in performance are more to be achieved by management understanding how employees perceive the world and encouraging and implementing changes that make sense to employees' worldview. Managing employee or system performance and aligning their objectives facilitates the effective delivery of strategic and operational goals; some proponents argue there is a clear and immediate correlation between using performance management programs or software and improved business and organizational results. In the public sector, the effects of performance management systems have differed from positive to negative, suggesting that differences in the characteristics of performance management systems and the contexts into which they are implemented play an important role to the success or failure of performance management.

For employee performance management, using integrated software, rather than a spreadsheet-based recording system, may deliver a significant return on investment through a range of direct and indirect sales benefits, operational efficiency benefits and by unlocking the latent potential in every employees work day. Benefits may include: Direct financial gainGrow sales Reduce costs in the organization Stop project overruns Aligns the organization directly behind the CEO's goals Decreases the time it takes to create strategic or operational changes by communicating the changes through a new set of goalsMotivated workforceOptimizes incentive plans to specific goals for over achievement, not just business as usual Improves employee engagement because everyone understands how they are directly contributing to the organizations high level goals Create transparency in achievement of goals High confidence in bonus payment process Professional development programs are better aligned directly to achieving business level goalsImproved management controlFlexible, responsive to management needs Displays data relationships Helps audit / comply with legislative requirement Simplifies communication of strategic goals scenario planning Provides well documented and communicated process documentation In organizational development, performance can be thought of as Actual Results vs Desired Results.

Any discrepancy, where Actual is less than Desired, could constitute the performance improvement zone. Performance management and improvement can be thought of as a cycle: Performance planning where goals and objectives are established Performance coaching where a manager intervenes to give feedback and adjust performance Performance appraisal where individual performance is formally documented and feedback deliveredA performance problem is any gap between Desired Results and Actual Results. Performance improvement is any effort targeted at closing the gap between Actual Results and Desired Results. Other organizational development definitions are different; the U. S. Office of Personnel Management indicates that Performance Management consists of a system or process whereby: Work is planned and expectations are set Performance of work is monitored Staff ability to perform is developed and enhanced Performance is rated or measured and the ratings summarized Top performance is rewarded Many people equate performance management with performance appraisal

Noel John Tanzer is a retired senior Australian public servant and policymaker. Noel Tanzer was born on 16 November 1931. Tanzer began his career in the Commonwealth Public Service in 1949, serving for 17 years in Brisbane. In 1980 and 1981 he was serving as a senior assistant commissioner in the management systems and efficiency division of the Public Service Board. Tanzer was appointed Secretary of the Department of Veterans' Affairs in 1986. Prior to his Veterans' Affairs appointment, he had been a Deputy Secretary in the Department of Social Security, he moved to the Department of Administrative Services in 1989. His task was to have the department operate in accordance with commercial principles, he aimed to improve departmental services to customers. He restructured 17 separate departmental units into four programs, offered redundancy packages to downsize the department, reducing staffing numbers by more than 1000; the new structure Tanzer established saw much of the department run on commercial lines and funded on a trust-account basis.

Tanzer retired from the public service in 1993, his final appointment was as Secretary of the Department of the Arts and Administrative Services. As head of the Department, he was responsible for handling more than $2 billion in revenue. In 1994, Tanzer was appointed as a consultant to the law firm Mallesons Stephen Jaques. Tanzer was made a companion of the Order of Australia in 1994

Instead of a single "inventor", the Internet was developed by many people over many years. The following are some Internet pioneers; these include early theoretical foundations, specifying original protocols, expansion beyond a research tool to wide deployment. Claude Shannon called the "father of modern information theory", published "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in 1948, his paper gave a formal way of studying communication channels. It established fundamental limits on the efficiency of communication over noisy channels, presented the challenge of finding families of codes to achieve capacity. Vannevar Bush helped to establish a partnership between U. S. military, university research, independent think tanks. He was appointed Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee in 1940 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, appointed Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in 1941, from 1946 to 1947, he served as chairman of the Joint Research and Development Board.

Out of this would come DARPA. His July 1945 Atlantic Monthly article "As We May Think" proposed Memex, a theoretical proto-hypertext computer system in which an individual compresses and stores all of their books and communications, mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider was a faculty member of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, researcher at Bolt and Newman, he developed the idea of a universal network at the Information Processing Techniques Office of the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He headed IPTO from 1962 to 1963, again from 1974 to 1975, his 1960 paper "Man-Computer Symbiosis" envisions that mutually-interdependent, "living together", tightly-coupled human brains and computing machines would prove to complement each other's strengths. Paul Baran developed the field of redundant distributed networks while conducting research at RAND Corporation starting in 1959 when Baran began investigating the development of survivable communication networks.

This led to a series of papers titled "On Distributed communications" that in 1964 described a detailed architecture for a distributed survivable packet switched communications network. In 2012, Baran was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society. Donald Davies independently invented and named the concept of packet switching in 1965 at the United Kingdom's National Physical Laboratory. In the same year, he proposed a national data network based on packet switching in the UK. After the proposal was not taken up nationally, during 1966 he headed a team which produced a design for a local area network to serve the needs of NPL and prove the feasibility of packet switching, he and his team were the first to describe the use of an "Interface computer" to act as a router in 1966, to use the term'protocol' in a data-commutation context in 1967 carried out simulation work on packet networks, including datagram networks. In 1967, a written version of the proposal entitled NPL Data Network was presented by a member of his team at the first Symposium on Operating Systems Principles.

Scantlebury suggested packet switching for use in the ARPANET. Davies gave the first public demonstration of packet switching in 1968 and built the local area NPL network in England, influencing other research in the UK and Europe; the NPL network followed by ARPANET were the first two networks in the world to use packet switching. In 2012, Davies was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society. Charles M. Herzfeld was an American scientist and scientific manager, best known for his time as Director of DARPA, during which, among other things, he took the decision to authorize the creation of the ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet. In 2012, Herzfeld was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society. Robert W. Taylor was director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office from 1965 through 1969, where he convinced ARPA to fund a computer network. From 1970 to 1983, he managed the Computer Science Laboratory of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where technologies such as Ethernet and the Xerox Alto were developed.

He was the founder and manager of Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center until 1996. The 1968 paper, "The Computer as a Communication Device", that he wrote together with J. C. R. Licklider starts out: "In a few years, men will be able to communicate more through a machine than face to face." And while their vision would take more than "a few years", the paper lays out the future of what the Internet would become. Lawrence G. "Larry" Roberts was an American computer scientist. After earning his PhD in electrical engineering from MIT in 1963, Roberts continued to work at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory where in 1965 he connected Lincoln Lab's TX-2 computer to the SDC Q-32 computer in Santa Monica. In 1967, he became a program manager in the ARPA Information Processing Techniques Office, where he led the development of the ARPANET, the first wide area packet switching network. Roberts applied Donald Davies' concepts of packet switching for the ARPANET, sought input from Paul Baran, he asked Leonard Kleinrock to model the network's performance.

After Robert Taylor left ARPA in 1969, Roberts became director of the IPTO. In 1973, he left ARPA to commercialize the nascent technology in the form of Telenet, the first data network