Testing the relationship between team and partner characteristics and cooperative benchmarking outcomes

Successful benchmarking can improve a company´s return on investment (ROI) ratio, facilitate cost reductions, identify new business opportunities, and help develop market competitiveness. However, there is limited evidence to understand factors that contribute to successful outcomes during benchmarking. This paper tests a sequential framework that identifies the key constituents of successful benchmarking projects. We focus on cooperative benchmarking projects where the expected outcome is identifying best practices with a partner organization. We characterize the benchmarking project in terms of its context, process, and outcomes. Our framework first relates the context variables such as characteristics of the benchmarking team and the partner organization to such process variables as effective project management and teamwork. We then relate process variables to the task and group related outcome variables measuring the effectiveness of the benchmarking project. The hypotheses derived from the framework are tested through a survey instrument administered to participants in benchmarking projects. The data suggests that satisfaction with the benchmarking process and findings (outcome variables) is strongly related to the following: internal context variables such as training and experience of team members, clarity of project objectives and support from top management, and the process owner; external context variables, such as appropriateness of the benchmarking partners, and anticipation of constraints in data collection during the project; project process effectiveness including commitment of the team members and the synergy between the process owner, the team members, and the partner organization. This paper contributes to research in cooperative benchmarking by identifying the critical success factors associated with such projects. It also contributes to the project management literature by identifying the context and process variables in projects involving multiple stakeholders. Project managers of cooperative benchmarking projects must simultaneously pay attention to the needs of benchmarking team members, top management, the owner of the process being benchmarked, as well as the partner organization.