Performance Management and Turnaround Mechanism of Poorly Performing Institutes

Performance management is a continuous and systematic process that allows an institute (an engineering college/ university) to ensure efficiency in rendering institutional vision and mission. The process involves college, departments, and faculty entitles planning educational programs and academic services based on the needs of employers and students. To achieve these, the colleges must recruit outstanding faculty, developing institutional goals based on the vision, andmission. This can be achieved through training and by developing the faculty, empowering the colleges and departments, monitoring the development process, auditing the outcome, evaluating the performance of the faculty and diagnosing the causes for shortfalls, implementing interventions like firefighting so that the loss of resources can be minimized. This study is based on the brainstorming sessions with thirty small groups of heads of departments from thirty-six engineering and polytechnic colleges over a period of five years. The groups have identified the problems faced by them in planning industry- relevant programs, establishing consultancy centers, planning in-house faculty development centers, planning state level seminars and industrial training programs for the students. The outcomes are creating a learning institute, engaging the faculty, establishing in-house faculty development units, formulating the process of undertaking consultancy projects, establishing academic council, following appreciative appraisal of the faculty performance, decentralization of administration of the departments, empowering the star performing faculty members, and introducing firefighting mechanism to correct the deviations in achievements.Also, the recruitments should be based the excellent achievement of the candidates.All these form the basis of learning institution which comprises of system thinking, personal mastery, mental models. shared vision and team learning.