Resource Management

In a business world where change is a constant and thus it is not always possible to know what skills are likely to be needed in the future, there is a need to adopt diversity in thinking with regard to resource planning. Dave Ulrich (2000) suggests five different strategies for building organisational and employee competence:

• Buy – acquire new talent by recruiting individuals from outside the organisation, or from other areas within the organisation.

• Build – train or develop existing talent through further education, formal job training, job rotation, action learning.

• Borrow – develop a partnership with other organisations/ people, e.g. consultants, vendors, customers, suppliers.

• Bounce – remove individuals who are under-performing.

• Retain – retain the most talented employees.

Does your organisation draw equally on each of these strategies, or does it tend to rely on one tried and tested resourcing approach? Does your organisation consciously build its knowledge base through encouraging different ways of working, e.g. crossboundary team working, virtual team working, or through strategic partnering? Are managers encouraged to think creatively about how to resource a need in their area, or do they automatically think that recruiting from outside is the only way?

If you have a central skills database, who monitors and reports on its usage to ensure that it is bringing the benefits that it was designed to bring? Who promotes case studies of good practice? What form does that take, e.g. feature in internal newsletters and/ or bulletin boards, line managers communicating stories at team meetings?

Do managers and individuals give sufficient priority to keeping the central skills database up-to-date, so that the right people can be quickly located for projects, or to help resolve operational difficulties? Do managers spend time with individuals helping them review, refine, even discard, details in the skills database? Is this practice linked to regular feedback and/or performance review sessions?