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June 2009 - Issue 6

Welcome to the latest edition of iProCon Insight, your leading source of transformation, human capital strategy and technology theory and practical advice.

Features
 

News

HR Shareholder Value Map

iProCon HCM has developed a workshop to help HR experts:
  • to understand the concept and components of shareholder value
  • to understand HR's current contribution to shareholder value and discuss it with line managers, the Finance Director or the executive board
  • to develop approaches to increase HR's contribution to shareholder value through a redesigned HCM or new HCM initiatives.

One tangible result of this workshop is an HR Shareholder Value Map. Click here to see a simplified real life example of how one organisation identified and redesigned their HCM value drivers. Or find a one-day workshop design here.

SAP HCM: Change Management in International Rollouts

Together with colleagues from iProCon in Germany iProCon HCM consultant Sven Ringling facilitated a workshop on 30 April about international rollout of SAP HCM. Topics he addressed included the strategic alignment of design choices, project management, and change management, which again turned out to be one of the major challenges. In particular, managers tend to forget that the corporate centre often needs to change even more than the subsidiaries that are to be integrated.
To discuss your HR-IS rollout projects, just send us a message.

New book from iProCon authors published by SAP PRESS

In a joint effort involving authors from iProCon HCM, iProCon in Germany, and SAP the second edition of the book "Mastering HR Management using SAP ERP HCM" was now published by SAP PRESS in Europe and America.
The combination of expertise in technology, process, project management, and HR-strategy makes this book a valuable resource for anybody involved in or planning for SAP HCM projects.

HR Strategy and The Black Swan


In his book “The Black Swan” Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows how the world is driven primarily by large unexpected changes, as opposed to the small ones that are usually considered within business forecasts.

In Human Capital terms, the impact of Taleb's book is that no single team within your organisation (such as the Risk Management Team) can deliver the resilience needed to deal with these shocks most effectively - it requires a coordinated, holistic approach that spans all business units and teams.

This article shows how the Management of Human Capital can drive the execution of a Black Swan ready business strategy. Click here to read “HR-Strategy and the Black Swan”.

Simple tools to define and deliver the vision

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 define and deliver the vision.

 

BiteSize


Pay EITHER consultants or IT staff to do the same job - not both

We’ve seen dozens of IT departments with quite large teams, but lacking the expertise to do real high quality work on their systems. In particular it can be quite difficult for people to build deep technical competence in ERP systems.

Many IT departments have a high staff turnover (often internal to keep people happy) and/or use people from the business side with no technical background. This leads to teams with many generic capabilities, but few hands-on skills. As a result, “consultants” are hired to do the work, even though from the number of people on the payroll, few external resources should be required. You end up with fifty IT staff “project managing” fifty “consultants”, who do the work the IT staff are paid to do in the first place – in most cases with no or little knowledge transfer. You can rely your own team OR on consultants to get a job done, but don’t pay twice for it.

The core message: Doing a skills review and redesigning the skills and sourcing strategies will usually save your organisation a big chunk of money.

E-mail may cost you USD 21,000 per employee and year

A recent study "Hidden Cost of Information Work: A Progress Report" conducted by IDC states that knowledge workers on average spend 13 hours per week on e-mail. Assuming average salaries this corresponds to about USD 21,000 per year. That's an interesting number!
E-mail is an important and often efficient tool, but it's worthwhile checking whether there are inefficiencies to drive out or more appropriate tools available for certain tasks.
E.g.: our experience shows that a so called CYA-culture ("cover your ass") leads to far too many CC-messages, easily doubling the number of e-mails each individual has to deal with.

Does your organisation's culture support effective and efficient use of modern communication and collaboration tools?

Thoughts on Creativity from under African Skies

Derek Cheshire brought back a few interesting and inspiring thoughts from his recent trip to Malawi, where he spoke at seminars and workshops on "Creativity and Innovation". He suggests that very formalised education, although considered a big advantage for developed countries, might also stifle creativity. Read more about his experience and ideas about creativity, education, and the developing world in his recent newsletter.

Recruiting: social media beat job boards and search firms

US-based recruitment specialist Jobvite recently published the results of their "2009 Social Recruitment Survey".  
While it can be argued that the survey has a natural bias (Chances are that respondents are more open to social media than non-respondents - particularly, if many Jobvite clients participated. Also: with 30% of respondents technology firms have more than their share.), there are a few points that still seem very valid:
  • Use of social and professional networking sites (not distinguished that way in the survey) in recruitment is growing and by now widely accepted.
  • Job boards and search firms lose ground
  • Employers are disappointed with the results they get from job boards and search firms
  • Employee referrals deliver best results and will be used more. There is much unused potential even in the US, where they are used far more than in continental Europe.
  • Employers will invest more in recruitment through social media and are more satisfied with their results than they are with job boards.
  • In the US LinkedIn leads the pack far ahead of Facebook and Twitter
These results are also in line with research and project experience of iProCon HCM consultants.
Jobvite's survey says that 68% of employers already use social networking for recruitment and 13% plan to start in 2009. From those, who are using it, 95% use LinkedIn at least as one of their tools.
These numbers do certainly look different in Europe, particularly in continental Europe. With some support from our consultants, our German sister company iProCon GmbH conducted some research and ran a trial to find out which networking site would be best suited for active search (i.e. searching for candidates through the site's search function - not waiting for candidates to find the company) of IT and management professionals and graduates in Germany. They decided that XING is their first choice and are now actively using it to find German speaking SAP HR consultants. Click here to learn about their e-recruitment research (German only).

Executives are disillusioned with HR Transformation

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, for a first discussion.

Recommended Book: The Black Swan and other books on Unpredictability and the Extreme

The knowledge source on our website offers a selection of books that the team at iProCon HCM have found beneficial. This month we present a number of books dealing with uncertainty, unpredictability, and extreme events.
  The Black Swan is a must read to inspire fresh thinking about management in real world uncertainty, and to expose established mindsets about predictability. This book is covered comprehensively in this month's white paper "HR Strategy and The Black Swan".

Other books dealing with uncertainty and unpredictability are covered in this month's review, The Black Swan and other books on Unpredictability and the Extreme

Events

iProCon HCM Senior Partner Sven Ringling and senior partners from iProCon GmbH will be speaking at the AdManus Praxistage SAP HR conference on the 22nd and 23rd September 2009 in Hanover, Germany. Topics will include Project Management, Change Management in international rollouts and Talent Management.

For further details and to enrol, please see the brochure and registration form.

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