KEIBA Business Reviews

Archive for the ‘Management’ Category

If you are looking to expand in a company and offer the company a better employment than you are already offering them, then it may be time that you think about getting into management.   Management is one of the best things to get into if you are looking to sit behind a desk or to do a little amount of work in a whole week.  Usually managers are salary, which means that you will not be getting paid hourly, so your current wages will not be used.  The best part of the management agreement is that you will be able to work a shorter week just as long as you get the job you need to done.  If you began by working for a union though, some of the benefits of the union may be interrupted because of the move in your position.  By becoming a temporary manager you can figure out if you like the position or not and then make your decision as to if you would like to stay or not stay.

The idea of the interim management is a great idea to get workers involved in some of the management activities in their workplace.  This is one of the best ways to get people into the management of your company.  If no one knows how the management part of the company works, no one will be able to replace any of the old managers if they decide to leave.  Many managers are always going in and out of management because they are all suppose to hit goals.  Because the managers have to hit goals, it can be hard for them to make sure they are hitting their goals and will end up getting fired.  Because of this, many managers will be replace throughout the course of the year a couple times.

Project Management

One of the toughest jobs of the project manager is making sure you actually receive the resources you have been given for your project.  People resources are the trickiest of all because each person assigned to you can choose to come to your meetings or not, answer their phone or not, respond to your e-mails or not, review materials you send them or not, do their work on time or not, and so on.

If your team members are also your employees, then you have tremendous influence over these decisions.  But in many project situations – virtually all large project situations – your team members are not your employees, instead they are ‘borrowed’ from other managers in the company.

This means their number-one priority is NOT you or your project; their top priority is pleasing and meeting the needs of their line manager.

If you get people resources on a ‘dedicated’ basis – meaning you get 100% of their time for the duration of your project – then their manager has pretty much handed them over to you.  You effectively become their line manager for that time period, usually up to and including giving input to their performance, salary and bonus reviews.

However, in any situation where an employee has to split his or her time between working for their line manager and working for your project – even if you negotiate prorated input to their performance reviews – you need to understand that the other manager has far greater influence over their time and decisions than you have.  You will have to deal with that fact for the duration of your project.

It is a good practice to be wary of time commitments for any resource assigned to you on a split-time basis, particularly if anyone is allocated to you less than 50%. Here is:

Why a less-than-50% allocation so often fails:

Human nature is such that both you and the person’s line manager will both attempt to task this person 100% anyway, creating a situation in which all three of you will lose.

Human nature also dictates that if it comes to making a choice between pleasing you or pleasing a line manager, then the person will choose the one who has the most impact on salary, bonuses, performance reviews, and job security. In a matrix situation, you lose.

People in this situation inevitably find their energy and attention is fragmented between the project and all other work. It takes more time and effort on your part to keep such team members up-do-date on what’s happening in the project. They, in turn, lose track and lose momentum switching back and forth.

People whose time is fragmented miss meetings. Your project is now subject to the whims and inefficiencies of whatever else is going on in their non-project time. When emergencies crop up in those areas, your project suffers.

The worse case I ever saw of this was when I was working as a consultant to one Fortune 500 company during a time period in which they started and concluded buy-out negotiations with another Fortune 500 company. People who had been assigned to my project on a split-time basis suddenly began skipping project meetings because they were getting pulled by their line managers into meetings related to the buy-out.  The impact to my project was that after 90 days the program had only received 60% of the resources we needed.

The smaller the time commitment, the lower our project sat within each individual’s priority list. Once the buy-out was announced, missed meetings and delayed meetings became rampant. Within this 90-day window, we had only one three-week period where we operated at full strength.

It is worth noting that even with this chronic 40% matrixed resource shortfall, our project suffered only a 20% delay in deliverables. The reason is we still had dedicated resources in the most critical positions, and they were able to create all sorts of workaround solutions that helped us make substantial progress in the face of otherwise overwhelming resource losses.

Since matrixed resources with split-time allocations are a fact of life in projects, how can you manage them successfully?

The solution is 3-fold:

1) Staff your team with the ‘right’ mix of dedicated and split-time resources.

For medium and large projects, in general, the shorter the timeline, the more dedicated resources you need. And, the more complex the project, the more dedicated resources you will need, so each key aspect of the project gets needed attention and creative leadership brainpower.  Even if your project is well underway as you read this, you can always step back and re-negotiate time commitments, if needed.

2) Track the time you actually receive from your resources each week and note any shortfalls, no matter how small.

This is largely a guesstimation exercise you and your leads conduct at the end of each week. If you wait till after the weekend, you will have already forgotten how the week went. If you wait for your time tracking reports – in the event your company not only has time tracking tools but actually uses them – not only will the data be too late, it will usually be incomplete.  In most companies, your pivotal business and management people aren’t required to use those tools.

3) Take immediate action to win back your allocated time from any shortfall resource(s).

Don’t take a ‘wait and see’ approach if someone misses a meeting or is late in a task or a response.  Instead, immediately follow-up and find out if this is a one-time event or a warning sign of more misses to come.  Find out what your team member needs in order to be able to attend all future meetings.  Work with them, and their line manager if necessary, to clear up any conflicts or issues. Then figure out to make up for the time that was lost, so you can make sure your project stays on track.

These three items are common sense solutions, but it is surprisingly uncommon to see a project manager do them all.  Be one of the uncommon few!  Since missing-in-action resources are such a challenging and chronic issue in many projects, there is a good chance at least one of these three options can help you today.

Home Business News

Tens of thousands of people decide to start a Internet home business everyday. Most will give up after only a few months after spending thousands of dollars on many affiliate marketing programs. The reason these people will fail of their dream of making money from home will boil down to one fact. Lack of knowledge.

Many people go off to college every year and spend thousands of dollars on an education so that they can get a good job and provide for their families. After years of schooling in their chosen field hopefully they will find a high paying job and after several more years of experience become an expert in what they do.

These same people will for some reason will start a Internet home business with no idea of how to make money and are amazed that they are not making money. Many believe that they were scammed because it is just not possible to make money at home. It is possible , in fact many people earn a full time income working from home.

Signing up for several affiliate marketing programs at once and spending hundreds of dollars a month on affiliate fees does not guarantee income. It takes hard work promoting your business and time to learn the business.

Just as going to college takes time and a commitment to learn so does the craft of making money from home on the Internet .

So if you are thinking of starting a Internet home business or if you already have one, good for you!! The Internet is a great way to make a living . But remember before you sign up for every affiliate program you find it will take time to learn the business.

There is no point of promoting affiliate programs if you have no traffic to your site. Instead of throwing your money into another system that promises to send traffic to your site or to get sigh ups for, consider saving your money and learn how to build your business yourself.

If you are willing and able to spend the money on one of the many affiliate marketing programs that charge a monthly membership fee my advice would be to stop and think about spending that money on a program that will teach you how to make money, regardless of what you are promoting.

Find a group of home business mentors who are will willing to help you succeed . Of course they will charge a fee, otherwise they would just be promoting their affiliate programs and not really be interested in your success.

So if you still are not making money with your Internet home business, instead of upgrading your membership to one of the affiliate marketing programs you are promoting use that money to increase your knowledge.

It will be money better spent now and in the future.

Executive Coaching

Almost all the blue chip companies have a provision for executive coaching for their employee at almost all levels. It is proven that objective-driven one-on-one interaction between the coach and the employee in the right circumstances can help the employees gain the professional focus that no other form of organizational support can ever achieve. In the initial stages when this form of life coaching was introduces, it was used mainly as a means to correct underperformance in a few employees. However, in today’s times of competition and stress, coaching is important for all the recruits, especially those who have the potential of becoming future organizational leaders.

The main purpose of executive coaching is to develop leaders within the deserving people and prepare them of the responsibilities to come, while maintaining their current level of day-to-day responsibilities. The coach provides the additional push which is required to enable an employee to attain better and quicker results and walk up the corporate ladder as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The most crucial part of this type of life coaching is the feedback. As the employee begins to grow constantly in the organization, the importance of feedback goes on increasing. However, the feedback which is provided by the company is far too irregular and insufficient to help the employee recognize his string and weak points. Executive coaching is the perfect solution to this problem. The coach is an outsider to the organization and his inputs to the employees about the ways in which they can meet their personal as well as organizational goals by sharpening their skills and overcoming all the current and potential hurdles can be very useful in improving their productivity.