Cezanne Software wins further European funding

The award will boost Cezanne Software’s research and development activities in the areas of performance and competency management.

The funded project, known as SOLOMON, will be led by Cezanne Software with collaboration from the Statistical Sciences Department of the University of Bari, and will focus on providing tools to help companies better manage and calibrate their performance appraisal activities.

Silverio Petruzzellis, Product Marketing Manager and head of the SOLOMON project explains: “A challenge for any business today is how to measure the performance of its people in a fair and objective way. Competency and skills appraisals are complex and, because they rely on individual managers who have their own perspectives on what is and is not, good performance, do not always give a true reflection of employee performance when viewed as part of the bigger picture. As a result, evaluation processes often need some form of calibration to remove bias and to give a more balanced picture of evaluation results in a company wide context.”

One method is ‘forced ranking’, where employees are distributed based on their performance in line with a defined curve. Probably the most well known example of this is the approach adopted by CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch, where 20% of employees were marked as having excellent performance, 70% as having average performance and the last 10% were marked as the lowest performers - irrespective of whether or not their performance was good enough for the role - and were ‘encouraged’ to leave.

An alternative to forced ranking, which can be interpreted as an abuse of management, is a softer approach where managers meet to share and compare the evaluations and rankings of their employees in order to justify the criteria they used, and to identify, as a shared exercise, consistent, company-wide rankings. Although this is a more democratic approach, it has a significant organizational cost and becomes rapidly impractical when the size of the company exceeds a certain threshold.

As one of its main goals, the SOLOMON project aims to look at how statistical techniques can be applied, both during and after the appraisal process, to help line managers make more objective and better informed decisions about employee performance. Silverio Petruzzellis explains: “As the project name suggests, our objective is to make it easier for managers to reach fair, considered judgments that are in line with company guidelines and standards.“

Carlo Ugdulena, CEO of Cezanne Software comments: “We are delighted to win this award, especially as bidding for European funding at this level is highly competitive. It reflects the fact that Cezanne Software continues to lead the way in Europe with innovative ideas aimed at addressing real people management issues.”