Tag: manager

by Incredible Planet Staff

KPI’s In IT Departments: Why It’s Imperative


Business

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are critically important to a business. Even managers unfamiliar with the term will understand the idea: KPIs are simply the body of data about a business that can be used to gain insight into its efficiency and profitability. Ideally, KPIs will be easy to gather and query from existing accounting or HR records and will provide data that can be used to make meaningful management decisions.

Many facets of business are relatively easy for a manager to observe: sales figures, operating expenses, safety records, and employees’ schedules should be plain as day. However, since IT typically plays a “behind the scenes” role, it can be difficult to assess just how productive the department is, especially if managers don’t have a background in that line of work themselves.

Measuring Everyday Operations

As with any department, the most important thing to observe with your IT workers is their daily productivity and cost-effectiveness. Some KPIs commonly used to determine day-to-day efficiency include average ticket response times, the percentage of orders resolved, and customer satisfaction rates.

Measuring Crisis Response

As anyone who has worked in IT knows, sometimes there are fires to put out. A team that works efficiently on most days might still not be well equipped to troubleshoot a serious unexpected issue. Measure your IT department’s resiliency in crises by looking at system downtime, the average time it takes the department to return to their usual tasks, and the profit lost during service outages.

Subjective Data

While the goal of KPIs is to provide an entirely objective analysis of an organization, it can also be useful to gather subjective reviews of your IT department from your customers, team members, and the IT department themselves. Subjective reports can, of course, be time-consuming to gather, and may be prone to personal biases, but they can go a long way to help shed light on the humans behind the numbers.

Planning for the Future

The most successful managers will use KPIs to strategically adjust their personnel for the future, always striving for both greater day-to-day efficiency and resilience when faced with tougher problems. Weak organizations merely improvise their responses to issues, and middling ones will have codified plans but limited experience implementing them. Strong organizations, on the other hand, have a robust plan for almost every situation, seasoned employees, and a strategy to continue growing stronger in the future based on the weaknesses identified by KPIs.
Knowing how to interpret and respond to KPIs is just as important as collecting them.

Disappointing KPIs may indicate it’s time for hirings or firings, reassigning tasks, or an equipment upgrade, and encouraging KPIs may mean that the business has room to expand. In an IT department, replacing old gear, outsourcing tasks to outside consultants, and focusing on employee development will typically yield the greatest results.

Does Your Business Need an IT Upgrade?

If your KPIs are revealing it’s time for an equipment upgrade or outsourced IT services, contact a reputable IT company as soon as you can. They should have the best ideas on how to tackle an issue and get it resolved quickly.


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by David Mackenzie

Why Building an Agile Hiring Strategy is a Must


Business

Do you remember the last time your organization lost top talent?

The consequences were huge: a lengthy recruitment period where competition from other companies for the best candidates was strong; frustration and disappointment within the organization; and the field of candidates wasn’t particularly strong and choices were limited.

Meanwhile, work output slowed and team members were overburdened perhaps leading to further team losses or even customer dissatisfaction. In turn, the financial implications of slower output, hiring and training costs were damaging.

These are problems that you will never go through when one of your prized employees leave if you have an agile hiring strategy in place. An agile hiring strategy is agile in name and by nature, which means you were able to prevent or combat these issues before they were able to cause any damage to your HR.

It’s certain: the wrong recruitment strategy can have serious consequences for a business of any size. Here’s why you need to introduce an agile hiring strategy that will eliminate many standard recruitment issues.

What is an Agile Hiring Strategy?

Agile businesses are responsive and reactive. This is because they pay close attention to their inner strengths and create a workforce where human intellect and employee mindset are incredibly highly valued. As a result, these businesses are quick to react to external changes within their industry such as new technologies or increased competition.

An agile organization knows its strengths and weaknesses because frequent internal analysis is key. Part of this is changing and adapting internal workflow processes as often as necessary so that the human element of the organization is adaptable, confident, and reactive.

Agile recruitment is responsible for creating this workforce. As such, it also needs to be agile by nature.

An agile hiring strategy may mean abandoning your organization’s traditional recruitment path, or funnel, your organization has typically used. It might be that an agile hiring strategy workflow looks more like this:

  • Paying attention to the who the ideal candidate will be particularly their behaviors and attributes.
  • Setting up alternative and multiple pathways to employment within your organization, including sourcing passive candidates.
  • Empowering your recruitment manager to make hiring decisions at whatever point they feel confident and comfortable doing so. This should not necessarily be at the end of a long and labored process.
  • Looking at alternative screening methods, beyond CVs, where candidates might be able to demonstrate the strengths you are looking for early on in the process.

Avoiding 4 Common Recruitment Issues with an Agile Hiring Strategy

An agile hiring strategy can help you easily avoid these classic recruitment problems:

  1. The Right Candidates are not Finding you

The way in which you cast your recruitment net may not be working for you. This means that there isn’t enough top talent approaching your organization. You may have vacancies for HR jobs in UAE, for instance; in this case limiting yourself to one rigid pathway will eliminate much of the vast pool of candidates who may otherwise be interested.

Solution:

Allow hiring managers to have a flexible route to finding the right employees and adapt the hiring process to suit them. This may mean multiple ways of locating the right talent but ultimately casts the net wider. It allows the right candidates to follow the path that best suits them.

  1. A Candidate Looks Great On CV but Performs Badly at Interviews

Interviewing candidates is time-consuming and costly. For this reason, it is frustrating when a candidate that turned in a great CV and looked so promising turns out to be not so great a fit for your role after all.

Solution:

Create a unique and powerful screening opportunity for candidates to demonstrate the skills you are looking for, alongside submitting their CV. For instance, a short video response if communication skills are key to the role, or an appropriate technical task.

  1. Great Candidate, Awful CV

You probably suspect that at some point, you’ve lost out on talent because their resume or application didn’t cut it. There are a number of valid reasons a great candidate can have a terrible CV, especially if they have not been actively seeking the role you are advertising.

Solution:

Attach greater weight to alternative screening opportunities to ensure this type of candidate is not ruled out instantly. An agile hiring strategy will allow hiring manager the opportunity to spot this type of candidate and develop a process that allows them to shine too.

  1. Top Talent is Lost to Competition

If your organization is confident that there is the right talent within a pool of candidates, why waste time continuing down the traditional hiring funnel. This time-consuming process means you risk losing them to a competing organization.

Solution:

Empower your hiring managers to extend offers as soon as they see fit.

In essence, an agile hiring strategy gives you the right tools to help you find the right employees more efficiently, and faster. In the current climate, this is essential if you are going to attract the top talent before they take up an offer elsewhere.