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Planning Ahead of the Chaos of Change
| If your upcoming project is one of those business transformative roller coasters, then you should be forgiven if you feel a little anxious about how to plan for it. What special communication tactics should be included? What assumptions for timing of activities are relevant? Heck, who are the additional stakeholders that must be established as partners?
Specifics of the situation can guide you. Here are some examples:
Change management is complex and commonly a part of IT efforts, yet it is rarely part of the IT organization’s expertise. Bringing in the right stakeholders in the planning stage can fill this gap and reduce the potential chaos. |
Posted on: April 04, 2008 08:27 AM
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How to Make High Performers Out of Everyone 2
| OK, so you use your competency management program to prepare a fact-finding mission. You seek out exactly what the high-performers are doing, including details such as
You may have to sit the individual down and go over in detail the whole workflow, maybe even follow them on the job. Whatever tactics you take, your objective is to see how they reach the heights of each of their competencies.
This description then becomes the template for guiding other workers to achieve the same high performance. The results of your analysis can be turned over to training or mentoring.
Perhaps training is already available in some of the areas. Now you have justification to add that training to your project planning. Maybe you can even find a way to get training staff to do the analysis for you. Hint: It may be as advantageous to their development as a training function as it is for you to get the training completed for your project. You just cannot do this with old fashoined job descriptions. |
Posted on: April 02, 2008 08:11 PM
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How to Make High Performers Out of Everyone
| Your IT organization should have replaced job descriptions with some kind of competency management system by now. Of course, you should have gotten the entire raise you expected and that didn’t happen. Even if you do manage the workforce using competencies rather than job description “activities,” you may not be taking advantage of its full power.
Every function has an individual that is a high-performer. The individual who makes it look easy day after day.
Wouldn’t it be great if everyone on the workforce was like this? Yes it would because studies have shown that high performers can be as much as 20 times more productive than the average worker. Imaging 20 times more productivity from the existing workforce or 20 times fewer workers doing the same amount of work. OK, your results may vary, but you would benefit greatly from a workforce jammed full of high-performers.
The key is to find out exactly what the high performers are doing – how they are able to reach the competency level. But you can’t make this really work unless you have established workforce management by competencies. It gives you the language you need to define and transfer the knowledge. More in my next post, including related project management tactics. |
Posted on: March 31, 2008 07:59 AM
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Get ‘em While Their Hot
| Finding the right IT candidate for your openings has been difficult in recent years. Maybe you should take advantage of the recession/not really a recession/recession-but-no-reason-for-panic to capture some new candidates. If you haven’t tried web 2.0 strategies, then perhaps you did not realize that 70% of undergraduate students and IT professionals in North America actively maintain social networking profiles.
You don’t have to learn what to do on your own, though. According to this article, Ernst & Young builds relationships on Facebook using job lists, employee contacts, videos, news releases, even polls and surveys. Deloitte held a film festival on YouTube of videos made by their employees about life at the firm, reaching a “diverse and rich” pool of potential candidates.
These are case studies to get you thinking. The exact network you use should target the candidate(s) you desire. Just off the top of my head, I would suggest this surprising example.
More tips to help you plan or improve your strategy:
Want to go big? Engage a vendor to create a social networking site for you to use, in part, to interact with potential candidates. For more quick research, stay on this site and search (top right of most pages) using the terms “social network.” |
Posted on: March 26, 2008 11:08 PM
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In a Downturn This Training Strategy Lets You Down
| If your organization is like most others, the training function has been transformed into an entity which supports current and urgent needs in existing initiatives and projects. That appears effective when numbers are crunched in the short-term, but what happens when the economy goes south and your market suddenly shrinks? Initiatives are eliminated or put on hold. No new initiatives are generated. Then what skills does your workforce have to improve the situation?
Not much if they have only been trained on specific initiatives or projects. They don’t know how to innovate. They don’t know how to adapt to market changes. They don’t know how to respond together to recapture success. They may not even be customer-centric enough to retain exiting customers. It may or may not be too late for your organization to rejuvenate the training function to build these skills. Training and HR leaders should know what to do – it’s part of their professional culture. They’ve just been suppressing their desires to start such a program. See what they can do to help your organization weather this storm. |
Posted on: March 21, 2008 12:42 AM
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