Performance topology mapping: understanding the drivers of performance

Understanding the drivers of performance is fundamental to the development of operations strategy and the effective management of operations. Emerging from the service management literature, the service profit chain is a framework which draws together many assumptions about the drivers of performance. From a different perspective, the performance management literature offers several approaches to understanding performance relationships, the most widely recognised being strategy mapping. Each of these approaches has been influential in both academic and practitioner domains, but they share a common limitation: each may lead researchers and managers to make assumptions about performance relationships that may not hold true. In this paper a different approach, called performance topology mapping, is proposed and evaluated. The evaluation is based on a comparative analysis of the service profit chains and performance topology maps generated on the basis of data collected in two large retail chains. The analysis suggests that performance topologies provide rich, context specific descriptions of the complexities of service performance, revealing performance relationships that were not apparent in the service profit chain and leading to a better understanding of performance relationships in the two organisations. Reconfiguring, or ‘morphing’ the topologies provides a fresh perspective which can facilitate organisational learning and provide a more robust basis for building strategy maps. It is contended that performance topology mapping may facilitate the generation of new narratives to explain performance, without the constraint of generic models or prior managerial assumptions, and thus enhance the context sensitive understanding of performance relationships.