iProCon Insight - Latest Thinking

Simple tools to define and deliver your vision
Monday, June 08, 2009
Many senior management teams have a clear idea of what they want their organisation or project to achieve, but have difficulty in distilling the often complex plans into a clear message for all staff. In tandem with this challenge is the need to overcome organisational inertia to bring about change and deliver your desired vision.

This paper focuses on two simple tools that can be used to address the above challenges. The first, the identification of Critical Success Factors, is a relatively simple way of articulating what must be performed well in order to achieve your vision or strategic objectives. The second, the Force Field Analysis, is used to identify the forces that drive and restrain the achievement of an objective, making it easier to identify the next steps that will deliver maximum benefit.

Click here to read about simple tools to define and deliver your organisation or project's vision.
Executives are disillusioned with HR-Transformation
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
A recent economist.com article said: "...some (HR-)transformations eliminated up to 70% or more of the workload of the traditional HR generalist", but "The great expectations that HR transformation aroused, however, were largely frustrated. After a decade, fewer than 5% of executives said they thought that their organisation’s management of people was not in need of improvement."
So, in most cases HR-transformation managed to drive efficiencies, but utterly failed to achieve the expected improvement in HR's strategic contribution. This article certainly could not have surprised us less. Actually, it reads as if it had been written to explain, why iProCon HCM was established in 2008. Our mission is and always has been to improve the link between an organisation's management of Human Capital (including, but not restricted to, the HR function) and its business goals: Leveraging Human Capital to improve Business Performance. We started this consultancy because we have seen far too many examples, where this link was broken.
However, as indicated in the economist.com article, HR-transformation as it is usually pursued is not set up to achieve significant strategic results. In most cases it was an exercise to reduce HR admin effort and then it was hoped that the freed up resources would make HR a strategic partner - with more or less the same kind of people, skills, line management involvement, executive roles, etc. Most organisations recognised quickly that this wouldn't work and reduced HR-transformation to a mere cost-cutting exercise - quite often a successful one based on a rightsourcing strategy.

At iProCon HCM we have a different proposition for HR-transformation: we developed the HCCEM as a framework to set targets and drive the transformation of people management throughout the organisation with a very clear line of sight to business goals. Alignment with business strategy AND organisational culture are 2 out of 6 dimensions monitored across all areas of Human Capital. The HCCEM is basically an HR maturity model, inspired by the CMMI used in IT, but with an even stronger focus on business impact. It also comes with a best practise template to allow a quick start and initial assessment.

See an excerpt of the HCCEM framework (PDF), click here to learn more about the HCCEM and HR-transformation, or get in touch with us for a first discussion.
Accelerating transformation
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Many organisations we talk to are struggling with similar issues. How can they ensure that the transformation is happening as quickly as possible? What can be done to make sure that those lower down the organisation have the same sense of urgency as those at the top? How can the transformation roadmap be defined so that the vital many have as clear an idea of the journey as those who defined it?

To address these challenges iProCon HCM has, over the past 12 months, developed and deployed the Human Capital Capability Excellence Model (HCCEM™).



The model and its underlying tools and processes deliver several significant benefits:
  • It helps the organisation understand what best practice actually looks like (in terms of managing change, people metrics and information systems, amongst other aspects related to human capital performance), encompassing both industry specific and cross-sector dimensions.
  • It benchmarks the current state of the organisation against best-practice. Benchmarking allows comparison across regions, business units or individual locations as appropriate.
  • Capabilities and Excellence are defined in terms of Levels. For example, Level 1 might be poor, whilst Level 5 is best practice. These definitions allow the organisation to define what level is desired and aim only as high as will deliver a positive return. If a business unit is at Level 5 in a capability where the organisation only requires Level 4, resources can be diverted to upskill other business units, or investment may be reduced.
  • The definition of levels (for example Levels 1 through 5) provides a road map for transformation. Managers responsible for business units sitting currently at Level 2 can clearly see what is required in order to reach Levels 3, 4 and 5. This helps them understand the transformation journey, but in steps that are driven by the agenda set by the top team.
  • Transformation progress reports become a repeatable activity that is baselined across the organisation as a whole. The nature of the tool allows reporting by exception to the top team: Who moved up a level in the past month? Why? Which business unit is lagging on the achievement of particular capabilities within the desired time frame? These progress reports become a significant leading indicator of future business performance.
The HCCEM™ is already helping numerous organisations to deliver their transformation projects more effectively and efficiently. Each implementation builds upon the significant volume of work that already underpins the model, delivering maximum results for a minimal investment. If you would like to see how the HCCEM™ can help accelerate your transformation effort, please contact us.






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