Posts Tagged ‘change’

Matching Your Organisation to Your Sales

October 19th, 2011

This is the first in a series of posts concerning the successful management of high growth businesses. One of the most common problems high growth businesses face is how to match organisational growth with sales.

The Problem

Simply put sales can grow discretely and tends to be quite smooth. Organisations growth, by contrast, tends to be much more lumpy. This is because a certain staffing complement has a finite growth capacity and beyond that point just adding people doesn’t help. In fact at some point adding people reduces performance. What is required is an organisational restructure which will create a step change in a company’s ability to support its growth. However this is not easy to accomplish because most SME’s address this problem too late. This often results in business growth reverting to the typical “lumpy” organisational restructure rather than a smooth increase. The reason for this is that sales now have to wait for the organisation to catch up so you tend to end up with a year of rapid growth followed by a year or even more of no or even negative growth.

Typical Situations

Smaller Businesses tend to rely too heavily on a few key people, this results in a stagnation of performance of the remaining staff who have little or no chance to develop their skills. So when the time comes to reorganise the business owners or management are reluctant to make the step change necessary to reorganise the business because they cant see who, apart from the usual suspects, who will be able to take on additional responsibility. What this results in is either a re-oganisation which is often half-hearted or too late. To provide a sporting analogy, hammer throwers are always told that they must remain ahead of the hammer. So as they speed up their revolutions in the circle they can properly time an effective throw. Small businesses rather like a novice hammer thrower tend to end up behind the hammer (read sales growth) losing control and finding out the hammer is in the wrong place.

The Solution for a fast growth business

Set your organisations structure to handle larger sales volumes than your current predicted sales growth. Target reorganisations earlier than demanded by your sales forecasting so they are already in place to meet forecast sales.

Some key actions:

Always! Always! Always! Implement a reorganisation ahead of its need. This gives you time to fine tune it is also the only way you can maintain that rapid growth. Establish a model for organisational growth. That is how will your business deal with sustained and rapid growth. Your plan must also be able to estimate at what point (size of revenues) will you be needing to consider the next reorganisation.

Reorganisations must have longevity. Typically a major reorganisation should last about 24 months, with interim adjustments taking place yearly. Recognise that reorganisations get bigger and more complex as you get bigger, so have a post reorganisation quality control process so that you can check the success of your implementation. In a high growth environment keeping your growth momentum is critical, don’t allow your organisation to fall behind that demanded by your sales growth otherwise your only answer is to slow growth to catch up which can completely stall your momentum.

Posted in Project Management, Team Management

The Environmentally Aware Project Manager

September 26th, 2011

Project Management is often concerned with managing limited resources – there never seems to be enough time allocated to complete the project or to complete individual tasks within the project. Neither does there ever seem to be enough budget to cover everything that needs to be done to deliver the project successfully. Even those projects that start off on-track with time and costs very often veer off course when the inevitable change requests start to roll in.

In many parts of the world we have already become used to the idea of recycling our household waste and large organisations are taking the recycling of (particularly paper) waste seriously too. But wouldn’t it be better if we restricted our use of precious resources in the first place so we had less to recycle?

So how can we integrate an awareness of the environment into project management?

Perhaps the first step is to ensure that every decision made on a project is viewed from an environmental perspective. From the basic decisions on how to share and distribute project documentation right up to the design and production methods for the end product.

A simple way to make a start is to display a small message at the bottom of every email reminding the reader not to print it out unless absolutely necessary. And the obvious next step is to always use electronic documentation, never paper copies. There may be some resistance to this, particularly in meetings discussing requirements when everyone wants their own paper copy to make their own comments on. But consider this – how many of those attending the meeting already have a laptop, iPad or other electronic device that could easily take the place of a paper document?

And what about travelling (particularly flying) to meetings when video-conferencing is so readily available. We could probably all minimise our own personal carbon footprints by keeping flying for only those really essential project meetings.

But being an environmentally aware project manager is not simply about these basic and obvious steps. It is also about viewing the product to be delivered in an environmental light, particularly where production methods may not be energy-efficient or where the end-product itself may not be energy-efficient.

The benefits of energy-efficient production methods and end-products are not purely environmental ones. There can be significant cost reductions to this approach and the bottom line is always easy to sell to stakeholders. Outdated production methods can often be upgraded to provide substantial savings over time.

Take as an example Apple who is committed to designing and producing energy efficient products. The energy a technology gadget consumes when plugged in and switched on contributes significantly to the environmental footprint of the company who produced it. It also contributes significantly to the individual’s environmental footprint. Energy efficient products are good for the user as they reduce electricity bills and energy-efficient production methods are good for business as they reduce costs of production. Both contribute to a reduction in the environmental impact of greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

So every project has the opportunity to improve its environmental credentials in both small and large ways and project managers who are well-trained in techniques for making the most of limited resources are well-placed to have an influence over decisions, large and small, that might have an environmental impact on projects that they lead and direct.

Posted in Project Management