Dr. Ayham Ja’roun, Head of the Industrial Engineering Department at An-Najah University, participated in the International Performance Management Association Conference held at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University in the UK July 11th-13th 2012. The conference was organized on behalf of the Performance Management Association (PMA) by the University of Cambridge. The conference chair was Professor Andy Neely from the University of Cambridge, and the co-chair was Professor Mike Bourne from Cranfield School of Management, UK.

The main theme for the Conference was Performance Management: From Strategy to Delivery, exploring the latest thinking and research into how to connect strategy to delivery, through technology, systems and process. The conference was a mixture of keynote and plenary presentations, as well as parallel streams and discussion groups. Delegates and presenters came from a range of academic disciplines, as well as the business and public sector communities.

The aim of the PMA conference was to bring together those who want to explore and better understand the role that performance measurement and management plays in improving organizational performance.

Three world-class keynotes spoke at the conference; Howard Dresner, a widely regarded expert in business intelligence and Professor Gerhard Satzger, IBM’s Director Business Performance Services, Europe, and Professor Christopher Hood, University of Oxford.

The Conference covered a number of topics including but not limited to: Strategic Performance Management, Enterprise/Corporate Performance Management, Performance Measurement Frameworks: Design and Deployment, Measuring Dimensions of Performance: New Measures of Performance, Intellectual Capital and Intangible Assets, Innovation Measurement and Management, Measures of Trust and Corporate Social Responsibility, Environmental Measures and Reporting, Aligning Measures and Strategy, The Role of Technology in Performance Measurement and Management, Business Intelligence and Analytics, The Impact of Performance Measurement and Management, Public Sector Performance, Measurement, Rewards and Incentives, as well as Performance Measurement and Culture.

Dr. Ja’roun delivered his research paper which he co-prepared with Professor Chris Backhouse, Vice President of Loughborough University for Strategic Planning. The paper was titled “The Application of the Vanguard Method to enhance service workers performance”.

The aim of Dr. Ja’roun’s paper was to study an innovative model of service operations design models known as “Vanguard Method” through exploring its impact on the performance of workers in the services sector. Two studies have been conducted in the UK on two organizations in the public sector using multi-level interviews, collecting related documents, as well as the emotional commitment questionnaire among the workers in the field of services.

Results have shown that the Vanguard Method allows for the identification of two major determinants to achieve a higher level of performance among the workers. These two determinants are known as the Organic Structure which is related to the organizational structure of the service department, and the high levels of emotional commitment among the employees.