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Summary
Large organizations today have many ongoing activities and competing operational agendas that support performance management processes – Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecard, the Baldrige National Quality Program and ISO certification, for example, as well as operational initiatives. All of these involve personnel, sometimes many people. To what can be a chaotic situation, Y-Change brings order through a program and portfolio management software approach for performance management. As organizations begin to understand the difficulty employees face in coordinating the details of performance management initiatives and processes, products of this kind will be embraced to help bridge the gap between daily and weekly activities and monthly and quarterly performance targets. Ventana Research recommends that organizations assess their existing processes, determine which programs are essential to achieve performance management targets and find methods to more easily manage them.

Assessment
Our research has found that more and more corporations are investing in performance management initiatives. As they do so, they often encounter the challenge of managing the various processes and activities that further those initiatives. Typically, that tracking is spread across multiple processes (such as Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecard, the Baldrige National Quality Program and ISO certification) and is poorly coordinated. With this research note, we are initiating coverage of Y-Change, which provides software designed to help organizations streamline the programs and activities that go into performance management.

Professionals focusing on performance improvements generate large volumes of presentations, documents, key performance indicators (KPIs) and reports, but these often are poorly managed and their linkage to the strategies and objectives of the organization isn’t always apparent. Most organizations rely on e-mail and on quarterly review meetings, with little in between. But the breadth of details in managing programs across a department or business unit can overwhelm even conventional project management tools, which typically are designed for project managers and not business managers.

Y-Change has created an enterprise-level strategy management application to oversee activities, meetings and documents so employees can focus their efforts in a more strategic manner. Its software can help improve time management and the correlation of activities from the individual to the corporate level. Serviceable for global enterprises and midsize organizations alike, Y-Change applications are easy to configure and administer by business users, requiring little IT involvement. The applications are available on demand through software as a service or on premises through licensing.

Tools such as Y-Change enable organizations to treat performance management as a continuous process and invest in it appropriately. One goal of such efforts should be to enable their teams and employees to manage most of their efforts themselves.

Market Impact
The market for process tools supporting performance management is expanding. Whether companies’ primary concerns involve HR, Finance, Operations, Customer Service or another department, innovative vendors like Y-Change are producing new applications to help. Our analysis of the company, its products and current customers indicates that it can fill a gap not addressed by providers of enterprise resource planning (ERP) or business intelligence (BI) tools: support of performance management efforts by managing initiatives and activities and correlating existing documents. Actuate’s PerformanceSoft division and Pilot Software also play in this market of strategy and initiatives management.

Recommendation
Organizations that seek to manage performance are discovering that they also must manage the processes of performance management. However, managing activities and information across strategies, initiatives and objectives is complicated by the array of communications channels and silos where presentations and other documents reside. Organizations that want to improve performance throughout the organization should consider Y-Change for program and activity management. Ventana Research sees this application, specifically designed for performance management, as a useful tool for achieving the goal of linking strategy to execution.