Archive for the ‘Strategic Planning’ Category
Benchmarking Your Shared Services Organization
Why Benchmark? Benchmarking is a proven tool for improving efficiency and reducing operating costs. Using common or industry key indicators for the service, an organization compares its indicators against the indicators for leading organizations providing the same service. Benchmarking tells you how your organization stacks up against other organizations. Just identifying where there are gaps is not enough. A good benchmarking study also tells you why gaps exist. It provides a road map for improvement by comparing processes, technology and differences in the operating environment that impact performance, efficiency and cost.
No CommentsIntegrated Project Planning – A Strategic Tool for Managing Shared Services Priorities
An integrated project plan is a tool for linking short term initiatives to an organization’s strategic plans and for making efficient use of scarce resources. An Integrated Project Plan is a framework that links all project plans. It is characterized by a single resources pool that is shared by all project plans so individual project managers can view resource allocations across all projects. This results in more realistic estimates of finish dates and helps an organization prioritize competing projects. It also guards against over extending in demand resources like IT. This is easy to do when each project manager operates in a vacuum and each project plan has its own walled off resources pool.
No CommentsHow Big is the Gap Between Government Shared Services and Industry Shared Services?
How big is the gap between government shared services and industry shared services? Very Big.
Government lag far behind corporate America in adopting shared services as a business model for reducing administrative overhead and improving efficiency. This is true whether you use as a basis of comparison employee headcount or corporate revenue vs government appropriations.
No Comments3 Best Practices For Shared Services Start Up
Recently I had an opportunity to reflect on best practices in starting up a shared services center. I can think of at least 10 best practices that distinguish “best in class” shared services centers from their mediocre counterparts. But I was asked to name only 3. Experts may disagree but here is my list.
1). Adopting usability principles and practices in the design of your customer interfaces. Interface is broadly defined as every point at which the SSO touches its customers and all the ways in which customers interact with the SSO. Forms, form letters, standard emails, your contact center, your customer portal and even your processes for requesting and delivering services are interfaces.
2). A robust business intelligence infrastructure that gives you end-to-end insights into your processes, service levels and costs.
3). Good tools and tight processes for tracking and managing costs down to the unit of consumption or service instance.
No CommentsAccountability and Transparency
Recently an article of mine on the relationship between transparency and accountability was published in the Federal Times. Read the full text of the article.
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