The Practice of Combining Job Roles in Tough Times January 11, 2009
Posted by jimintriglia in Career Management, Management Strategies.Tags: management employment job roles
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When I began my career as a business analyst, a mentor cautioned me to carefully consider the nature of my resources before making changes to a business process flow or the people that manage it.
Specifically, he was talking about the people behind the processes. Adding a resource like a color copier to a business process tends to have a linear impact on the workflow capacity. The same is not necessarily true of adding or subtracting people from a workflow.
“It takes a women nine months time to deliver a baby; two women assigned to the same task cannot have a baby in four and half months time. Remember that.”
I did.
Some things just take time. It doesn’t matter the number of resources that are assigned to some activities and tasks. A certain amount of time is required for successful completion.
While this concept may be obvious to most business owners and managers, tough economic times often give birth to staff reductions.
What sometimes follows on the heels of a staff reduction are Frankenstein-like redesigned job descriptions that combine multiple job roles. These job descriptions often defy common sense respective of the nature of professions and the actual time needed to fulfill multiple job duties.
Such job opportunities often go unfilled as professionals 1) cannot qualify in all of the knowledge and skill areas, or 2) realize there is not enough time in the day to accomplish all of the listed responsibilities.
So what’s an alternative to creating the unachievable and unfillable job description? I’ll post some alternatives strategies in a future update of this post. Stay tuned.
Manager Tools: Learn to Be a Better Manager January 8, 2009
Posted by jimintriglia in Career Development, Education, Job Search Management, Job Search Strategies, Management Strategies, News & FYI.Tags: business, Education, Management
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Like many busy professionals, I carry an inexpensive MP3 player loaded with audio books and podcasts to stay abreast of business management and career best practices. Much of this kind of content is freely available and aggregated by content management platforms such as iTunes.
One of the best sources of free self-improvement podcasts is the award-winning Manager Tools podcasts, produced by Mark Horstman and Mike Auzenne. Mike and Mark have produced an awesome collection of podcasts for management professionals covering a broad range of topics.
The Manager Tools podcasts are not just for management professionals. The Career Tools podcasts are an excellent source of career management best practices. Career professionals can benefit significantly from career management strategies, tactics and tips provide by Mike and Mark.
Stop by the Manager Tools website and share in the wealth of information that Mike and Mark have assembled. Check out the Community Forums and Recommended Books section of the website for additional resources that will improve your management skills and professional career.
JIRA: A Robust and Capable Workflow Management Tool January 7, 2009
Posted by jimintriglia in Business Process Improvement, Internet/Web Services, Management Strategies, Workflow Management.Tags: BPM, busines process management, JIRA, workflow
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One aspect of managing the development of a software application is tracking and reporting of customer issues related to the use of the software. While some organizations accomplish the task of software issue management using nothing more than a simple sprea
dsheet, there may come a time when a spreadsheet proves to be an ineffective and inefficient tool for issue management.
Atlassian’s JIRA is a robust and capable issue management system that provides managers with a powerful issue management platform. One of the key benefits of JIRA is the extent that the default workflow can be customized.
In working with the Enterprise edition, I’ve been able to customize JIRA to satisfy an organization’s need for a mission-critical software defect, software development, work request, change request, system deployment, help desk request and project management systems. JIRA’s fully customizable workflow enables me to custom-fit JIRA to any business process involving manual or automated systems.
Atlassian provides a 30 Day free trial of JIRA and also offers free use of JIRA for nonprofit organizations through it’s Community and Open Source Licensing.
The package may be installed on an organizations servers and managed in-house; smaller organizations can take advantage of JIRA’s hosted solution.
To see JIRA in action, visit Atlassian’s online JIRA development and issue management systems. You can also visit one of many customer JIRA issue management systems that are live on the Web.
Create Your Custom Newspaper with Pageflakes January 2, 2009
Posted by jimintriglia in Apple Mac, Internet/Web Services, Management Strategies, News & FYI, Personal Computing.Tags: web services
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The nature of my work demands that I stay on top of developments in many different areas. I don’t have the time (or patience) to sort through dozens of periodicals and daily newspapers searching for pertinent facts.
Pageflakes is a free web-based service that delivers pertinent news and information in real time right to my desktop. Since I can specify the topics and select the news sources for my news pages, I can control the content and layout of the information that is delivered.
Pageflakes provides custom ”flakes” that you can choose to populate your custom news page(s). You can also import other subscribers “pagecasts” (Like Jenny Zuko’s “Mac Attack” pagecast, for all things Apple) and specify RSS feeds so you can keep track of blogs of interest.
With Pageflakes as my default web browser home page, I have up-to-date custom news and information at the push of a button. In the age of information overload, Pageflakes is a valuable resource for the busy professional.
Business Process Reengineering: A Strategy in Tough Economic Times December 31, 2008
Posted by jimintriglia in Business Process Improvement, Management Strategies.Tags: BPM, Management, Process Analysis, Process Improvement
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During tough economic times, some organizations will invest more time in evaluating how efficiently and effectively work is performed across the enterprise. This is driven by the need to reduce costs and maximize efficiency across the organization.
While the discipline of Business Process Management (BPM) can offer significant benefit relative to improving the effectiveness and efficiency of key operational and management processes, adopting a BPM methodologies with it’s associated application software and systems can represent a daunting task for many organizations.
A “baby steps” approach that I’ve seen successfully employed involves beginning a process improvement project by first analyzing and documenting an organization’s key business processes. Deliverables from such an initiative include cross-functional diagrams (“swimlane”, business process diagrams), cause and effect (Fishbone”) diagrams, policy, procedure and practices manuals, and in some cases, data dictionaries.
Once managers and staff have representative models of how work is performed in the organization, they can then begin to discuss how work can be conducted more efficiently, which typically leads to reducing the cost of providing a service, developing a product, or managing the organization as a whole.
Business analysts are often engaged to analyze an organization’s business processes. Using nothing more that a visual presentation tool like Microsoft’s Visio, business analysts can work with managers and staff to develop visual depictions of key business processes. Visual process diagrams can often uncover where inefficiencies exist and cost savings can be realized through better use of existing resources.
Hopefully more executives will focus on business process improvement and re-engineering as a pro-active strategy to managing tough economic conditions. Reactive tactics, such as across-the-board staff reductions, often preserve inefficiencies of the organization and can actually increase costs for the organization.
