Posts Tagged ‘Stakeholders’

May 21st, 2009  Posted at   Operations Management

First, know what your business is all about? Next, only outsource what you know. Finally, get rid of the idea that outsourcing translate to immediate cost savings.

Do your due diligence before making outsourcing your preferred mode of operation. I would recommend that organization first operate the “proposed outsourcing work” internally to get a feel of what needs to be outsourced. A wholesale outsource without proper planning will hurt bottom-line and impacts business performance. Plan as though you will be recruiting full time staff to carry out the tasks. Then where applicable, perform the activities in house and measure the performance.

Click to continue reading “Sensible Outsourcing”

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April 29th, 2009  Posted at   Operations Management, business

Business owners must treat outsourcing as a strategic move and not as an opportunity to offload “no-one-wants-to-do” activities in the organization. Carefully plan your outsourcing needs to avoid future repercussion on your business performance.

Outsourcing is not equivalent to transferring of responsibilities to another party. You, as the business and process owner, owns the entire value chain. Always manage all your outsourcing entities and business as though they are internal resources. This article discusses on the total cost of outsourcing and what it takes to manage a outsourcing relationship effectively.

Click to continue reading “Don’t be doomed by outsourcing”

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April 26th, 2009  Posted at   management, project management

Keep the Change! discusses the basics on how to achieve permanent result after change implementation. Managing change effectively and efficiently is key to success for any business. Companies must be flexible and agile to face changes. M&A (like the recent Oracle-Sun deal), market volatility, disruptions in traditional ways of doing business (crowd sourcing, web 2.0…) and technological advancement are some reasons why business will fail if there are not enough emphasis being put on Change Management.

Click to continue reading “Keep the Change!”

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April 22nd, 2009  Posted at   Operations Management

Incident report is an important communication tool to keep all stakeholders aware of disruptions in a production environment. Timely report gives people the confidence that their business is in good hand.

After a disruption of service that impacts business operations and performance, a customer would be keen to know if the IT team has taken steps to avoid recurrence. An incident report will provide information that give the customer assurance that their interests are being taken care of.

Click to continue reading “Increase customer satisfaction with good incident report”

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April 17th, 2009  Posted at   Organization Behaviour, management

A successful consultant and project/department manager makes him/herself redundant by selflessly building the foundation that others will use to solve problems, operate a business and deliver results.

To be a successful, you must find ways to consistently add value to the organization (your employer, your own business or your client) you work for. For that to happen, you need to constantly challenge yourself and be innovative.

Click to continue reading “If you want to be successful, start making yourself redundant now”

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The purpose of setting objectives  that are tied to dates is to empower, motivate and to measure performance. Date is one of the easiest and achievable metric that we can set for measuring performance.

Click to continue reading “Respect Deadlines”

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March 31st, 2009  Posted at   Organization Behaviour

I don’t have time to write reports.

My boss does not read my reports anyway.

I have nothing to report.

Does this sound familiar to you?

Report writing should not be a chore but an activity that you can enjoy (because you achieve the result you want through the report). Here are some guidelines:

  1. Know who are the report recipients. Be it a project or weekly report, you must have an audience to write to. Knowing who are your audience helps you to create a high impact report. You want your reports to be read and achieve certain reactions don’t you?
  2. Establish objective of  your report. What is the message that you want your reader to receive? For example, in a project report, you want your readers to be aware of the project’s health (is it on schedule, any new risks identified or issues that requires attention).  In a weekly report, you want  your boss to be aware of your contributions, achievements as well as problems that requires his/her support.
  3. Develop templates that you can easily insert contents. Report writing should not take more than 30minutes. For that matter, no one says that you should write  your weekly report only on the last day. You can spread out your report writing over the entire span of the week.
  4. Identify the areas in which you want the report to help you achieve your goals. A good and consistent report can help you drive the project and getting all the individual activities owner on their feet because the report is being read by all the important stakeholders.
  5. Be creative and sharp. Use pictures, charts, tables, etc, to deliver crispy clear message to your ready. For example, instead of writing how well  you have done to maintain high up time for your system and services, it would make more impact if you draw a few charts showing the trends.
  6. Keep it short and simple. Don’t write a 50 pages report. If you do not want to read a long report, what makes you think anyone else would? If someone wants to know more, they will approach you for elaboration.
  7. Be punctual and consistent. If you deliver your report every Tuesday at 4pm, then do so consistently. This will help to reinforce the authority of your report and generate anticipation from your audience.
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March 28th, 2009  Posted at   Operations Management, project management

Anyone who consumes your services or products are stakeholders to your project or operation.

Putting in more effort to identify all your stakeholders from the onset has many advantages for a project or an operation.

  1. Number of changes (in scope and schedule) are reduced in project. Scope change happens when newly identified stakeholders request for certain features to be added or tighter schedule to meet their business needs.
  2. Improved communication which leads to higher customer satisfaction. If you do not know who consumes your services, you will end up “neglecting” some group of users. For example, if you plan for a maintenance window, you have to inform all your stakeholders regarding the activities and the associated impacts. Anyone not in the loop may results in unnecessary business disruptions and revenue losses.
  3. Project budget is more realistic with more stakeholders participation in the cost estimation process. Budget padding will be minimized since less assumptions are made on behalf of other “unidentified” stakeholders.
  4. More stakeholders = More risks can be identified. This translates to more predictable and manageable project/operation.
  5. Useful reports can be generated when all stakeholders’ interests are taken into consideration. Performance metrics are predefined together with stakeholders. Never generate a report that no one is interested to read.

Identifying stakeholders in a project is a progressive activity. In an operation, however, the challenge is that there are new consumers of your services which you may not be aware of. The only time you know you have a new stakeholder in operations is when you receive complains. This will be discussed in future articles focusing on operations management.

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