Human Performance Improvement: Building Practitioner Competence
Improve your bottom-line results with this handy reference guide that provides the tools and techniques fundamental to the practice of HPI and carrying out your own plan.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Human Performance Improvement: Building Practitioner Competence
Chapter 3: The Role of Intervention Specialist
Overview
Most human performance improvement (HPI) practitioners, as well as managers and other stakeholders, are eager to find a solution or select a performance improvement intervention. The previous chapter explored the role of the analyst. You learned that one key tenet of HPI work is a strong grounding in performance and cause analysis. In other words, the urge must be resisted to jump to an immediate solution to performance problems. The interventions that are eventually applied to the performance problem or opportunity should result from careful analysis. In other words, careful analysis leads to selection of the appropriate intervention. Without analysis, solutions are unlikely to be effective and may even make matters worse. Like physicians who are advised to at least "do no harm" in treating their patients, HPI practitioners should also avoid causing more problems than they solve. That can happen if the wrong intervention is selected to solve a problem.
This chapter reviews the role of the intervention specialist. First, the role is defined and the competencies and outputs associated with it are described. Next, a range of possible performance improvement interventions is discussed. This chapter also reviews various techniques for identifying and selecting appropriate human performance improvement strategies. The chapter concludes with some cautions about potential dangers and pitfalls in selecting interventions.
ASTD Models of Human Performance Improvement defines the intervention specialist as the role that "selects appropriate interventions to address the root cause(s) of performance gaps" (Rothwell, 1996). The terminal output related to the role...
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