Your company cannot without growth. And to make this growth possible you need various types of resources of which the human resources are the most important. They determine the way in which the other types of resources like systems and infrastructure are managed. Together they constitute this unique building that is your own company and not the one of the competition.

When preparing for this growth, you are offered a myriad number of solutions, methods, intermediary products, advices, etc, to support the process. In the mean time the current operation needs to continue, clients are (if you are lucky) waiting.

All those resources, you can dedicate as means, have their own characteristics. Through a growing number of different solutions, the number of decision you could take increase at the same time. Different managers in different areas in your company will have their own preferences for these kinds of solutions.

The innovation manager wants new products and preferably tomorrow if not now. The sales manager wants flexibility because the client will change its preference overnight. The operations manager is concerned with stability, the technological department wants to experience a new solution with leading edge technology, Administration is concerned about future maintenance and fulfilment requires a fluent process. The service management wants the least possible problems.

How do you manage? How do you make sure you can manage all these choices efficiently?

If you hire a consultant for this problem, the first step they will take is an analysis of precedents. Did others deal with this problem before? The answer is: yes. Investment managers did.

“Do you mean the investment teams who are competing with dart-throwing-apes to beat the market?” Yes, especially they have because of the highly complex area they are dealing with. They have found a set of investment rules, ones that are always valid – which we would call – best practices – and others that are specific rules because of their specific investment profile.

In your organization you can benefit from this approach. What you should do is making your rules explicit in your organization. It saves unnecessary discussions. If you ever have tracked the amount that is spend on meetings, discussions and other communication in your company, you should be sensitive for an argument to use this time as efficient as possible. If we go back to all these different people, managers, teams and departments, they perform best if they share some basic principles. If we observe Marketing, Sales, Technology, Administration, Customer support, they have all their own view on management issues. You need to align all these different backgrounds, sometimes more technical, sometimes more commercial.

You cannot do this for all issues, but you can for 80% of them. How? Again we step back to the investors and their portfolio. They have many different instruments. A stock has a different risk/return characteristic than a bond, an option or a future. However, for a balanced portfolio with a certain profile, you need them in a certain distribution.

The portfolio of a company could be characterized in the same way, by means of a portfolio of resources with their own characteristics and rules. For the way to growth you need solutions on one side and a way to implement them on the other side. Without going into details you have different choices in the type of solution and in the way to implement them. These choices are determined by simple rules that are valid in each company. The set of rules could be seen at the specific profile of the organization. Banks support their customers for gaining insight in their personal investment profile. If you want to know how this works for an organization follow this link: model organization.

© 2005 Hans Bool / Astor White

Hans Bool (The Netherlands) is the founder of Astor White a consulting company dedicated to (the human side of) management consulting and e-advice. He has many years of experience in (project) management, consulting and business architecture. He studied economics and has recently published the book: “How to manage your organizational portfolio – just stick to your rules”.

http://www.astorwhite.com

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