The Meirc Blog

Employee Engagement

 Employee Engagement: Do you know what it is and how to measure it?

 Do know what the top engagement drivers are? Five things that engaged employees' value?

Meirc Training and Consulting is introducing a new training program for professional project managers to learn about advanced tools to manage their projects. This training course will provide an in-depth knowledge on creating and managing project from planning phase to execution.

The certified program will cover topics in project selection techniques using financial and non-financial models, advanced project planning, budgeting, resource management, slack management and risk management. It will also cover tools that are used to monitor, control and report the progress and the status of the project such as variance reports and earned value. The course will also cover tools that used to manage complex projects such as system anatomy, kokotovich Triad and program tool.

Meirc certificate in advance project management will be in premiered in May 2011.

Is a written policy report considered a solution to occupational health and safety issues? Does management commitment to safety make a difference?

Before we answer those questions, allow me to state few useful statistics:

• - Nearly 50 employees are injured every minute of a 40-hour workweek and almost 17 employees die each day (USA).
• - According to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA, USA), nearly one/third of all serious injuries and illnesses stem from overexertion or repetitive motion. These are disabling, expensive injuries.
• - Establishing a safety program to prevent injuries is not only the right thing to do, it is the profitable thing to do.

Based on the above few useful statistics, it is safe to assume that Management not only has an ethical and moral obligation towards organizational Safety, but also a "dollar and cents" obligation. Studies have shown a $4 to $6 return for every dollar invested in health and safety within the organization. Therefore, it is essential for management, top management in particular, to demonstrate not only an interest but also a long term strategic commitment to protect every employee from injury and illness on the job.

Every project which have status FAILED have some or many reason for failed. Project managers should identify the possible root causes of the potential failure and take corrective actions to prevent the project from falling through the cracks. The following are some of the steps that project manager should look at very closely:

• Is there flexibility in the triple consrtaints of the project (scope, time and cost)?
• Is the leadership committed to the project and willing to take extraordinary measure to turn the situation?
• Is the right people in place?
• Is the business case still strong?? If not, how can we stengthen it?
• Do we have appropriate change management in place??
• Are the communication channels function properly?
• Is the risk management plan up to date??

These are some of the steps that are recommended to start examining in order to bring the project back on track.

There are many tools that quality professionals can use. Experience and practice can help professionals pick the right tool. Some of the tools used are:

1. Lacking Sponsor's Involvement/Ownership

2. Absence of a Project Management Methodology

3. Scope Creep/Unrealistic Expectations

A Loyal Customer is a Good Customer!

(... Or is he? A brief look at the Customer Profitability Whale Curve)

Companies are spending so much effort and money trying to create loyal customers that any dissenter to the assertion made above runs the risk of being ridiculed, labeled an ignorant and of having her voice being quickly smothered before infecting anyone else with that heretic thought.

How do you measure the impact of your Sales and Marketing decisions?

Sales and Marketing people take decisions all the time. This might seem normal, but how would you evaluate and measure the effects of your sales and marketing decisions? If you don't, sometimes the output might turn to be catastrophic on profitability margins, the product/company image, inventory levels, etc.

Universities have always concentrated at the under graduate and on the post graduate levels on scattered courses relevant to different arrays of concentration (accounting, finance, marketing, HR, etc). Rarely are the academic institutions who promoted the idea on how to think in a "transversal" way? For example: How can marketing decisions be measured or validated in financial terms? How can HR decisions contribute to improving sales revenues? In real life situations, this is all you need to understand and do!!

How often are you asked to prepare reports? always!? and I bet one of the ways you retrieve the data is by importing or copying the raw data from your system and pasting it to Excel. then you insert rows, columns, move cells, highlight cells, delete some unneeded data, then...you are lost and you start over!!!

Pivot Tables comes to the rescue. I can truly say that Pivot Tables is the most efficient tool EXCEL has developed in the early years of 1990. This tool, once you know how to use it, professionally, will transform the way you manage, analyze, and report your data. I, personally was able to prepare a comprehensive budget variance reports, by department, in few seconds, among many other dynamic reports.

The newest news is Excel 2010. It comes packed with enhanced Pivot Table tools. Have you tried Excel 2010 yet?

In the G-20 summit (the richest 20 countries on this planet), and in the midst of the financial crisis the world was facing, leaders were discussing accounting rules!! Not debits and credits! I don't think they go into that detail! But what they are demanding from the accounting profession is to come up with one set of accounting rules that all companies can use regardless of their location. OK,... what does this have to do with the financial crisis? And how would one set of accounting rules help in solving the problems of the world's economy?!

Let's go over the definitions first: IFRS stands for International Financial Reporting Standards which are established by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). GAAP stands for Generally Accepted Accounting Principles which are established in the US by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). Basically, these are two sets of accounting rules dominating the accounting profession globally with few differences ... few but might amount to millions of dollars!

An example of the differences is in the methods allowed in inventory costing. Last-In First-Out (LIFO) is allowed, and widely used, in the US while it's NOT permitted under IFRS - most companies applying IFRS either use Weighted Average or First-In First-Out (FIFO). In one of our accounting training programs, we apply different methods to the same data and we notice that net income under FIFO is higher by $1.5MM had we used the LIFO!