Tim is currently the product director for AmazingPhones, a company making high end smart phones. He just walked out of the quarterly strategy review meeting where he got a shocking news. AmazingPhones is going to ditch its propitiatory operating system platform and switch to the market leader. This is generally a good news considering that the propitiatory platform is quickly losing it following and the company is desperately looking for alternatives. Question in Tims’ head is, are we ready?
Tim came back to his office and asked Jan, Sr. Analyst, to do a quick situation analysis on company’s new position in the market. At the same time Tim analyzed the customer profiles, current suppliers and marketing channels. With a wide array of market studies available, Tim and Jan were able to quibble out a lot of information pretty quickly. With a large market presence, extensive patent portfolio, brand recognition across demographics and the newly adopted platform the choice seem to be a hit out of the ball park. Still Tim was not entirely convince. “Do we have the human capital to support this shift?”
Tim decided that a good place to start would be analyze what the future org structure would look like. Major impact would be on the product management, development and support staff. He logged onto PeopleSoft and opened up company directory app. He then searched for the Director of OS project and OS support. He then quickly flipped to the direct line reports tab and downloaded the team structure into an excel. Now he has a team structure that should closely mimic the team structure of the future.
Image: Company Directory
Image: Company Directory List View
As a next step, Tim formed a core team including IT Director Sheila and HR business partner Jon. They decided to create new job positions in the OS division with competencies, responsibilities and qualification matching up with the desired level that the company need to make the shift. Jon, created new positions and Sheila then filled in the desired capabilities using the job profile functionality. Then came the fun part, Sheila did a search/match for the new positions and found employees that matched the desired capabilities to certain extent. This helped in assessing the skill gap which was bigger than expected. This skill gap, if not filled, will quickly translate into performance gap.
Image: Job Profile
Image: Job profile search/match
Team now has two choices, they can either acquire the skills or develop them internally. Both of these would require two critical elements, money and time. Tim requested Sheila to assign the employees to him with a dotted line relationship. Sheila assigned the requested team members and also gave access to Tim to create and current document action. Tim then searched for the available training and learning content to fill up the skill gap. He created development documents for the key team members and identified the training that is available to close the skill gap. He then browsed profile of a team member who has taken the training and reviewed his learner and performance profile. Trainee did not rate the training good and noted that subject matter should involve a lot more informal learning. Tim put a call into the L&D department to find out if any plans for informal learning are in place.
Image: Matrix org structure by team
Image: Development document with Learning Integration
Image: Learning Dashboard
Image: Class survey results
Jon pulled up the time to fill and cost to fill pivot charts. Using pivot grids, he adjusted the parameters to the closest in-house positions and noted down that it took minimum of a month of search time and cost around $10,000 avg. per position. He then drilled into the incumbents and analyzed the past performance data. He found out that the performance remained low to average for first few years and then it really took off.
Image: recruiting home
Another way to acquire talent would be an acquisition. This would provide matured talent and assets instantaneously. There are a lot of small startups in the market that are ripe for picking. Tim quickly pulled up a canned report on job code analysis through self-service reporting framework. He filtered the report to display data for some of the recent acquisitions (by business units or company) and jobcodes in question. To his surprise, acquisitions, targeting small/med enterprise for talent had a very short employee lifecycle. Employees on an avg. worked between 1.5 to 2 years. Tim analyzed the career path and career goals for these employees and found a big disparity between what they wanted vs. what organization expected. Disconnect between expectation and objectives created dissatisfaction and hence brain drain.
Image: Self Service report pagelet
Image: Career Planning
Image: Career progression chart
Finally team explored outsourcing the functions with most skill gaps but defined decision support structure. Due to large competition in the market, the outsourcing contracts are cost competitive too. 10 out of the 15 positions fell into this category. Team worked with the L&D team to put a training plan in place to bring the internal team upto speed within 6 months. This involved informal and formal learning. Team worked with the functional managers to setup training status monitoring through learning dashboard and Development documents. Tim also worked out a transition plan with functional managers to bring back critical skills inhouse without disrupting the business.
Image: Guided process path with midterm checkpoints, learning and career planning integration
Tim finally feel confident about his plan and is ready to present it to executive team. He is excited to know that using the automated tools, analytics and decision support system, he is able to analyze, collaborate and make decision at a very quick pace.
Saurav Khandelwal is a solution architect who is working every day to simplify business processes in HR and Technology for large multinational organization. Saurav has led cross functional teams and border less initiatives at PNC Financials, General Motors, Hannaford Brothers and Covidien PLC. View Sauravs‘ profile at http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=47931968
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