This book introduces the concepts of Human Performance Improvement (HPI). It is written for a broad audience that may include trainers, Human Resources (HR) practitioners, line managers, workers, college students who are being introduced to HPI, and anyone else who is interested in improving how well and how much people perform in organizational settings. Improving Human Performance is thus intended for a multi-faceted audience, and serves a two-fold purpose. The first purpose is to introduce HPI by defining what it is, what people must know to carry it out, and what tools and techniques are fundamental to the practice of HPI. The second purpose is to show how HPI is applied in organizations. HPI is intended, pure and simple, to improve the bottom-line, measurable results of organizations, work groups, or individuals.

Chapter One, aptly entitled "Laying the Foundation," opens with a case study to demonstrate how HPI can be applied in practice. This chapter also defines such key terms as performance and human performance improvement. Performance, it should be emphasized here, refers to the results or outcomes of work. Human performance improvement (HPI) is "a systematic process of discovering and analyzing important human performance gaps, planning for future improvements in human performance, designing and developing cost-effective and ethically-justifiable interventions to close performance gaps, implementing the interventions and evaluating the financial and nonfinancial results." (Rothwell, 1996a)

The roles of the HPI practitioner are the focus of Chapters Two through Five. Its intent is to describe and build reader...