If you have the right skilled resources working in the right places at the right time, your workforce is optimized – it’s as effective as it can be.
And if you and your partners can automate the candiate evaluation process, you'll deliver more projects and generate more revenue.
For some talent managers, the biggest talent management challenge is their manual candidate evaluation process.
Automation is one of the three keys to workforce optimization. Read on to see how this key can unlock workforce efficiency and revenue.
Automation + Workforce Optimization = More $$
Here is a quote from a recent conversation:
“We can’t perform candidate evaluation fast enough. We’ve missed out on six and seven figure [business] opportunities by responding [to a Request for Proposal] one or two days late.”
In other words: "We can't find the right people fast enough."
This person runs a small IT consulting business and wears so many hats he needs a neck brace. He doesn’t have time to manually sort through resumes and spreadsheets to determine the best-fit for an assignment.
Because his shop is small, he has partnered with other small shops that have complementary capabilities. Of course, the owners of those shops don’t have time to manually process resumes and spreadsheets either. So, when the call is made to respond to an RFP, the process is something like:
- Call around to internal resources to obtain their resumes
- Have all the resources update their resumes or the company spreadsheet
- Manually compare each internal resource’s qualifications to the requirements of the RFP
- Identify gaps
- Call partners to find resources that fill the gaps
- Manually compare partner resource qualifications to the RFP requirements
- Build the RFP from the best approximate matches
This is a known process and can benefit in two major ways from automation. First, each individual partner can automate their internal candidate evaluation process. Second, the partner network can automate the process of responding to requirements.
Automating the candidate evaluation process enables quicker and more accurate responses to RFPs. This leads to more projects won, more projects delivered, and more revenue generated.
SagePoint can help your entire partner network automate the identification and evaluation of best-fit candidates – check out a customized demonstration to show you how. Also, stay tuned for parts 2 and 3, where we’ll explore how Standardization of candidate qualifications and Centralization of candidate data can drive benefit to the bottom line.
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There’s a reason that an entire industry exists around talent management and workforce optimization: it’s a core business task that’s very hard to do well. The monetary risks of hiring the wrong employee or deploying the wrong resource are numerous and varied, for example:
- Recruiting costs
- Interviewing / candidate evaluation costs
- Direct salary / benefits / wages
- Costs of project delays and rework
- Customer perception and impact to future business
What’s amazing is that this workforce optimization challenge is universal. It’s experienced by every company, project team and department on the planet, no matter the size, industry, or location. How can you help ensure that you place the right resources in the right places at the right times, every time?
The Keys to the Workforce Optimization Kingdom
There are three keys to doing workforce optimization well: Standardization, Centralization, and Automation. The role of each is briefly described below:
- Standardization. Each resume describes qualifications differently. Each manager specifies their requirements differently. This variability makes comparisons inefficient at best, and impossible at worst. Quick, which is the bigger apple: the one that weighs 6.20 ounces or the one that weighs 0.19 kilograms? To compare resources and select the best fit for the job, qualifications and requirements need to be standardized.
- Centralization. A hiring manager needs to staff a critical project team and receives 25 resumes from a recruiting firm. After the candidate analysis is complete, these end up in a drawer or in the trash, along with all the interview notes and analysis. The next hiring manager starts from scratch. Capturing and centralizing that data for your pool of internal and external candidates is essential to finding the best fit.
- Automation. You hire a rockstar resource after a six-week evaluation. Two years later, an emergency situation develops that requires the skills for which you originally hired that resource. When was the last time she used those skills? Have they languished? What new skills has she obtained? Who else in the company has these skills? Her two-year-old resume isn’t much help. Automated updating of resource skill set information when tasks, projects, and jobs complete provides the critical insight to make the best choice.
An optimized workforce is a productive, engaged, and content workforce. Stay tuned for future articles on how to achieve workforce optimization using these three keys.
Would you like internal and external candidate information presented in a standardized, compact format? Our free resource evaluation tool can help you get started.
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We recently attended the 2011 Aberdeen Human Capital Management conference. One of the themes that was reinforced by each presenter was that employee engagement is directly correlated with customer satisfaction, and customer satisfaction is directly correlated with a healthy, growing business.
In fact, Best Buy showed that employee engagement is so tightly correlated with store revenue, they could actually predict one another. Best Buy's data supports an obvious notion: engaged workers are more effective, productive, and valuable.
In that sense, a project environment and a retail environment are the same. To deliver a successful project, the team members must be fully engaged and laser-focused on satisfying the customer. How can you help your project team become fully engaged?
Project Management is Customer Service
When you walk into Best Buy to purchase a TV, it’s important to get a quality unit for the best price. But the level of satisfaction you feel is based only partly on this – the rest is based on the purchasing process. They don't want to sell you one TV. They want to sell you, your family, and your friends every TV you will ever buy. Retail understands that customer satisfaction is not a single point event – it’s about the entire experience.
Delivering a project is the same. The customer wants the project delivered on time and on budget, and every touchpoint and milestone is an opportunity to exceed customer expectations and reinforce your commitment to their satisfaction. Simply put: a fully-engaged project team is the most effective way to reduce project risk. Below are three quick tips to ensure your team is engaged and delivering:
1) You can’t manage what you can’t measure. How are you measuring your team’s skills? How are you ensuring they match project requirements? Tight correlation here is the easiest way to create an effective, engaged team.
2) No one ever got fired for thrilling the customer. How are you measuring and tracking customer satisfaction? A short customer or stakeholder survey given at critical project milestones will help bring the picture into focus.
3) Be a good vendor and a good customer. To properly deliver for your customer, your vendors must deliver. As a customer, set your vendor up to succeed – pay them on time, fully define deliverables and dates as soon as they are known, and if your vendor readjusts expectations, make sure you pass that through to your customer.
We can help you assess your team's skills, align them with your projects, and keep each team member fully engaged. To learn how, check out our free resource evaluation tool or sign up for a customized demo of our resource management software.
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If the key to a highly effective team is highly effective resources, it stands to reason the biggest detriment to a team’s effectiveness is highly ineffective resources.
That’s not true.
Highly ineffective resources are easy to identify and repurpose or remove. It’s the marginally effective resources that can truly keep a team from ever achieving excellence. So how can you prevent populating critical positions with only marginally-effective resources?
Hire a Resource, Not a Resume
Choosing the most effective resource starts with matching skills to job or project requirements. The most common tool used to match skills and requirements is a resume. In a perfect world, the most well qualified candidate also has the best resume – resume quality is perfectly correlated with candidate quality.
The end result of the candidate process is a binary decision: either you choose a candidate, or you don’t. The process of deciding is anything but binary. This is because candidate quality and resume quality exist on a continuum as two independent values. This creates a “candidate space.” The ideal candidate occupies only one point in that space.
Because the resume is the starting point for your evaluation process, the people you consider for the position are the ones that have the best resumes. The middle area is where the marginal fits enter the equation. Well-qualified candidates that don’t have the best resumes will remain invisible to the selection process.
Since judging resume quality is subjective in nature, it’s easy to miss excellent candidates. It's also easy to consider candidates that have great resumes, but in reality are only marginally-qualified. This is especially true if a 3rd party or automated method is used to assess resume quality.
Of course, you’re not hiring someone because they are an excellent resume writer or have done their research and know what keywords to include. You’re hiring someone because their skills match your job or project requirements. There is certainly some overlap, but there is also a large pool of qualified candidates that won't make it past the first gate.
With infinite time, you could read every resume, interview every candidate, try each person out for a few weeks and then make an assignment decision. You probably don't have infinite time. Thus, the resume is used to “sell” the candidate’s skills, which results in an unavoidably subjective and unreliable evaluation process. Given this reality, how can you better ensure the best match of resource skills and project requirements?
Ockham’s Razor
The answer is simple: stop using resumes! Use a tool that has the following features:
- Presents skills, qualifications, and experience uniformly for every resource.
- Contains only objective information.
- Enables easy updating as candidates' experience evolve over time.
- Can easily format and translate candidate qualifications into the language your project teams use to define their requirements.
Whether you build it or buy it, a resource evaluation tool that can accomplish these things may not come cheap. But, the benefits gained by teams performing at their peak will be worth the time and cost.
If you’d like some help breaking free from resumes and getting started with truly matching resource skills to job and project requirements, download our free resource evaluation tool.
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Self reflection is critical to project success. So, for the final post of 2011, I offer this short, multi-part post.
Looking back
I took some time and read all the articles I’ve posted here over the past six months. These three resonate with me the most. Feel free to take a minute and buzz through them one more time (or for the first time, if you missed them originally):
Looking forward
My own project, building the SagePoint Workforce Management Solution, is going through a period of rapid growth. We expect to announce our first partnership in Q1. Since project communication is critical to project success, we're replacing the screenshots on our home page and information page with videos – after all, if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth a million. Q1 will also see some new personnel coming on board to support all aspects of the business.
The lesson learned for me this year is one that’s proven to be true over and over again: perseverance is what turns the achievable into the achieved.
Optimize your workforce and achieve your business goals in 2011. Sign up for a free trial of SagePoint today.
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There are two major variables that maximize your project team's effectiveness:
- Evaluate candidates accurately and efficiently. Place the right skill sets in the right places at the right time.
- Once placed, provide the tools and environment to maximize the project team’s productivity.
The tools may change and evolve over time, but are easy to provide. The project environment is much more challenging to get right.
What’s the correct number of team meetings to ensure proper collaboration? What’s the right frequency of status meetings so progress can be reported? How many one-on-one meetings should be held to ensure activities align with goals?
The right number might be exactly zero.
Zero Meetings = Project Success
Jason Fried, founder of the project collaboration tools company 37Signals, makes the following observation about work: it’s like sleep. There are five phases of sleep. Each phase is successively more intense and restorative than the last. If you get interrupted during the progression, you don’t pick up where you left off: you start back at the beginning.
Like sleep, large blocks of uninterrupted time are the only way to get to the most productive work phases. And every time a meeting is called, the progression of your team members’ work phases is threatened.
In this TED talk, Jason describes this phenomenon in detail and offers alternative methods of simultaneously enabling collaboration while maximizing efficiency – without meetings.
Take 10 minutes and watch it now. Then, cancel your next meeting!
Now that you've maximized your project team's effectiveness, maximize your own efficiency in evaluating the project team members. Download our free resource evaluation tool.
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This is a common refrain in project management:
"I could complete this project on time and on budget, but I don't have direct control of the project team. I have all of the responsibility, but none of the authority."
It's Project Execution, not People Execution
What project managers really want is to reduce risk to their project schedule and budget. They think: if only everyone reported to me, they would do what I say, and the project would be executed perfectly.
There are (at least) three fundamental flaws with this notion.
- First, unless you’re on a battlefield, there are no resources that will follow orders blindly -- even if they are direct reports. Skilled team members need a compelling, logical rationale to align with a project’s trajectory.
- Second, the project manager may know what needs to be done, but doesn’t know *how to do it.* That’s why the project team members and subject matter experts are there.
- And third, having project resources directly report to the project manager adds project risk. Would you rather have your project manager track project metrics and schedule, or review time sheets and expense reports?
So, if giving the project manager direct authority of project team members won’t minimize project risk, what approach will?
Strategic Talent Management FTW
Strategic talent management is project management for dummies. In other words, milestones are not achieved by project managers commanding team members with regal authority. Milestones are achieved by properly matching task requirements to resource skill sets. (This resource evaluation tool will help you understand and compare resource capabilities). But this is only half the equation.
The other half of the equation is the management of all the project components that are not team-member-related, for example: project budgets, project schedule, and resource / effort-loading curves.
Project risk is minimized by giving the project manager absolute control over these things.
Consider a project budget that was approved for $20M. If every purchase order required 5 signatures, then the project manager will have to chase people down, explain the project 5 times, take management away from other tasks…meanwhile, calendar days are still ticking away. The project was approved for $20M. What value are these interim reviews adding? Even if they add some small value, it’s completely washed away by the schedule risk they add.
If you don’t trust the project manager to manage the project’s budget, then the best path forward is to hire one you do trust.
In conclusion, the most reliable way to minimize project risk is two-fold:
- Employ strategic talent management by matching resource skill sets to project requirements.
- Give the project managers authority over project resources, not project team members.
If you would like to learn how to match resource skill sets to project requirements -- and do it without having to read through a single resume -- download our Free Resource Evaluation eBook.
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On a recent episode of Meet the Press, President Bill Clinton was asked what the biggest contributor to poverty growth is in the USA. The obvious answer might be insufficent welfare or ineffective charities.
Instead, Pres. Clinton identified another root cause entirely: a mismatch between candidate skills and industry needs. In other words, America has one gigantic skill management problem.
Analyzing Skills Pays the Bills
Below is an excerpt from the transcript of President Clinton’s statements:
…Where are the jobs going to come from? Where's the money to finance them going to come from? And can people do them? For the first time in my lifetime, David, we are coming out of recession with posted job openings. …They're going up twice as fast as job hires in this horrible economy. Why? …way the biggest problem, is there's a skills mismatch. The jobs that are being opened don't have qualified people applying for them…There are five million people who could go to work tomorrow if they were trained to do the jobs that are open, and the unemployment rate in America would immediately drop from 9.6 to about 7 percent or 6.9.
A mismatch of skills and jobs is definitely a major problem. President Clinton suggests training new workers is the best means of addressing the problem...but this is only part of the solution.
Meet Your Match
The other part of the solution is what project teams do every day: candidate analysis and resource matching.
Why do job recs stay open for weeks or months without being filled? It's not because a qualified person didn't apply for the job. It's because after poring through the 20th jargon-laden resume out of the stack of 100, anyone’s eyes will start to glaze over.
In other words: hiring managers lack efficient tools to match candidates to tasks. In some cases, companies will simultaneously hire and fire because of a lack of visibility into their internal candidate skills and resource availability.
Training would address America's short-term need to develop a workforce for the current, technology-centric economy. But a streamlined, effective toolset to evaluate skills and candidates would become a sustainable competitive advantage for any company, in any country, in any economy.
We'd love to help you evaluate candiates efficiently and effecively -- simply Download our free resource evaluation tool and then try out our software for free.
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Does this candidate evaluation experience seem familiar?
Your boss or client tells you that a new project is mission-critical and fast-track – in fact, it was so important, the email had the little red exclamation point turned on. You need to complete candidate sourcing and fill the resource gap quickly, so you turn to a recruiter / monster / careerbuilder / dice / craigslist / your company’s internal staff to have a look.
What comes back is a stack of resumes.
You pick up the first resume, and encounter some mission statement like…
- “Motivated individual seeks challenging position for personal and professional growth.”
- “Industry expert and thought leader available to implement revenue-ramping methodologies.”
- “Professional guru with proven track record of driving key performance metrics seeks next challenging opportunity.”
…and you then proceed to read through four pages of single-spaced information. Buried in there amongst the conspicuously planted industry keywords and buzzwords is the 10% that is relevant to your open position.
After approximately 10 of these, you can’t remember which candidate had which qualifications. The morning coffee starts to wear off and your eyes begin to lose focus.
After another 10 of these, you have determined that only two of these candidates are even worth interviewing. You decide to punt and call the two or three rockstars you’ve worked with in the past. While the phone is ringing, you say a little prayer that they are available and you can still afford them.
There has to be a better way, right?
Resource Evaluation in Utopia
Wouldn’t it be great if you could easily determine:
- Exactly what skills a resource has, presented in a clear list
- Which past assignments used which skills
- Key details about project experience: scope, duration, recency
- How different candidates compare to one another
- All of this essential information at a glance
We think so...so we built a tool to do it!
The Resource Evaluation Tool captures only relevant, objective data and presents it in the same way…for every candidate. It’s the espresso of resumes: a super-concentrated, content-packed shot that can be digested quickly and gets the job done. And you can download it right now…for Free!
Please use and reuse this form. Feel free to distribute it to your friends and colleagues. Get it now by clicking the button below:
If we can modify this tool to make it more useful to you, please let us know in the comments. If you find this form useful, you’ll really like our software – sign up for a free trial of our workforce optimization software and start right now!
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Good project risk assessment is a powerful tool to keep projects on time and on budget. However, there is a subtle but enormous danger that many risk assessment efforts smack into head-first. Read on to find out what this danger is and how to avoid it.
Project Risk: Natural Laws Don’t Apply
Objects in the physical world are subject to the laws of the physical world: no matter what happens, matter can be neither created nor destroyed. Risk is not subject to these laws. Treating risk like a physical object can be fatal to project goals. Consider: by eliminating risk in one area, you may in fact be creating risk in another area. So, although a risk mitigation effort may reduce the threat of a specific risk, that same effort may drive up the total net risk in the project!
I found a perfect, real-life example of this in Malcolm Gladwell’s book. In the essay, Gladwell describes how there have been many advances in car safety equipment (anti-lock brakes, lane change warning systems, etc.), and as a result, logic dictates that the accident rate would be positively impacted. But has it been? No – the accident rate has been flat. How can this be?
The answer is that people feel safer. They travel faster. They pay less attention. They're less careful. In other words: they take more risks. Risk mitigated in one area was consumed in another area.
Conspicuous Consumption: Catch it Quickly
Apply this concept to a project environment. Let’s say you’re behind schedule for Project A, and you re-assign a project team rockstar from Project B to remediate the schedule. Now that the rockstar is on the team, you figure you can just add a few those nice-to-have items to the project scope that the marketing team says will drive sales. If you do this, you will consume the risk you eliminated by adding risk elsewhere.
Risk consumption doesn't have to stay within one project. When you reassigned the rockstar, you mitigated Project A’s risk – but simultaneously added risk to Project B. If you don’t calculate both changes in risk, you’re taking a big gamble that you haven’t added net risk. Can you quickly backfill that rockstar’s skillset on Project B? If your skill assessment and resource evaluation processes aren’t dialed-in, you’re now risking Project B’s budget and schedule even more.
The good news is that recognizing this behavior of risk is the best way to eliminate it, because the best way to blow the project schedule is to pretend there’s no risk at all.
Learn how to eliminate the risks of evaluating and assigning skilled resources. Download our free resource evaluation eBook!
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