Performance assessment and benchmarking
Willem F. Vlotman, Lambert K. Smedema, David Rycroft · 2020
Performance Assessment (PA) and benchmarking involve the assessment of the current state of performance of a system and the evaluation of the findings against widely accepted good performance standards. PA is different from monitoring and evaluation which is a more generic assessment methodology used to assess impacts of interventions rather than performance of systems. When the results of project/scheme PA are compared with the performance of other similar schemes this is referred to as benchmarking, a term often used in business and management for similar activities. Land drainage systems are designed to control the occurrence of excess water and salts in the root zone and as such, directly or indirectly, create favourable conditions for crop growth and farm operations. The performance assessment, to be really useful, should generally not be confined to the identification of the under-performance of systems but also provide enough insights in its causes to provide guidance to more detailed diagnostic investigations.