Stakeholder Management - Get Ready to Get Creative!

Stakeholder management is a pretty important component of any manager's role. In the main the key stakeholders will often be simply employees, the bigger organization and, of course, the customers and clients that are on the receiving end of the goods and services they purchase.

In many circumstances, stakeholders will be a considerably broader range - especially with larger projects - and it's vital to really understand just who will be affected by what you are doing and potentially how they will react as well.

Now, none of this is easy. It becomes less easy where a manager decides that he or she is the only person who is up to the task, thereby leaving a significant chunk of their resources in the team back in the locker room.

When this is a time to max out all the resources you have, losing possibly 95% of your people assets is likely as not an idea worth reconsidering.

By utilizing more of your team, as you come up with a plan of action for your stakeholder management, you are more likely to come up with new ideas and concepts, some of which might seem to be a bit off-the-wall to you.

Here's where the best managers are worth their weight in gold. They listen carefully to their people and stop themselves from 'editing' too hard when the wacky ideas come.

You see, out there in the real world, where stakeholders come in all shapes and sizes (often literally!), some creative ideas about how to firstly find and then manage them effectively, are much needed.

Taking a risk or two with the ideas your people come up with not only risks huge success, but it also risks building a dynamic team who will be energized by the way they are trusted to come home with the goodies.

Of course there are always going to be some ideas that get rejected, that's inevitable. What is vital is that the ideas are heard through and respected by careful questioning, that will enable the individual with the ideas to make their own decisions about feasibility and relevance too.

Remember, although something might not resonate with you in your ways of seeing things, there is everything to say that a different approach could make a valuable impact in the stakeholder activities that you need it for.

Sometimes, managers really do have to get out of their own way a little and go with the flow, because so often, there is much to gain and actually very little to lose!

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Training KPI and Effective HR Management

The use of KPI's or key performance indicators is quite a useful concept that has become popular in strategic management. Over the past years, the practice of management has been becoming more and more based on facts and observations, and it became logical to try and define which parameters could determine performance.

Being able to have quantifiable bases with which to measure various aspects of the performance and condition of an employee, group, or company has become one of the basic principles of sound management. After identifying the various measurable quantities available, it then becomes a matter of choosing the most relevant parameters. The most important of these parameters then became known as key performance indicators (KPI).

For instance, a training KPI is the average number of training hours that each employee has undergone within a specified time period, usually a year. This parameter would be able to roughly indicate the amount of training that an employee, on average, is able to get within that time period.

By considering both the magnitude and the rate of change of this parameter, management would be able to get a clearer idea of whether their employees are receiving enough training. Conversely, if this average number is too small, or if the rate of change is negative - that is, if the number of hours show a decreasing trend - then it might be necessary to route more resources to training.

Another training KPI that might prove useful is the average training cost, per employee, over a specified time period. This cost can then be compared against the average increase in productivity, to see if the training regimen that has been implemented actually worked. For example, a high average training cost together with a low average increase in productivity would seem to point towards an ineffective training program. A lower average training cost, on the other hand, together with a high average increase in productivity would mean that the training program implemented was a cost-effective one.

It can be seen from these examples, then, that considering training KPI's individually would not always yield accurate evaluations. This is because many of these parameters are actually interrelated, and must be considered together to represent a meaningful way of measuring performance.

It is still important, of course, to be able to identify what these most important training KPI's are, to be able to monitor all of them effectively. Once data has been gathered according to these known key performance indicators, then the data can be evaluated, in light of the relationships between these KPI's. A proper selection of KPI's would help to limit the data to be analyzed to those data that would really be relevant.

In today's world, organizations are more often than not forced to adapt to changing conditions and a dynamic marketplace. This places more importance on being able to evaluate and implement effective training programs. With the use of training KPI's, managers would be able to judge better and craft good training programs for the betterment of their organization.

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