Our Co-Founder, Bill Jaffe began to develop the idea of BBPMM using Adam Smith’s Natural Law concept while he was working with the federal government in the 1990s. In principle, BBPMM® derives from Adam Smith’s theory. Based on his own experience in organizational productivity, Bill Jaffe expanded Smith’s perspective by assuming that people respond to their own self-interest and work most productively to the standard by which we measure them.

At that time, the government was learning to articulate “performance metrics” in terms of services, as was being already used in products manufacturing.  Putting performance metrics into contracts that had not been linked to the behaviors of the people performing them led to undesirable outcomes, but the government overlooked these results.

The BBPMM® principle is:

“People will always perform most productively on those activities that are measured when the value of the measurement directly relates to their self-interest.”

Thus, the throughline from a person’s performance to the measurement of that performance, and on to their motivation for that level of performance aligns with Smith’s contention that people will be more productive when acting in their own self-interest.

That behavior will always take precedence as long as the person being measured understands they are accountable to a clear, comprehensible metric.  Using the example above, this means that workers are likely to plow as many fields as they can if that work is being measured and compensated accordingly.

BBPMM® improves workflow outcomes by aligning human self-interest-based behaviors with a set of tasks or processes necessary to achieve and measure standard, expected results. By comparing an individual’s performance metrics against standard, desired behaviors that produce expected results, the desired behaviors, themselves, can also become standardized. The behaviors that we link to desired results are the standards that become the “behavior-based performance metric.” BBPMM® empowers TAPE to anticipate our employee workflow performance output and thus the likelihood of consistently achieving the desired result for our customer.

TAPE, in its 20-year history, has adopted the principle of BBPMM® in developing quality performance metrics in accordance with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), both internally and externally, in all our customer contract work and all our teaming support. It is even part of our corporate tagline (described more below): Measure Us by Your Results®.  At TAPE, we describe our BBPMM® as perpetually reviewing the desired outcomes against the processes being used to achieve them.