Position Contracts - Template Policy

This is a template list of responsibilities that would be included in the company-wide portion of the individual position contracts.

Information Security & Computer Policy - Template Policy

Company Access to Equipment and Information:

Jury Duty and Court Appearance - Template Policy

ELIGIBILITY

Management Principles

Management by agreement and management by exception help build and sustain a working environment based on respect and trust through our communicating directly with one another and taking responsibility and accountability for ourselves and our actions.

Management by agreement and management by exception include these elements:

1. The manager and employee have agreements about what work is to be done and how and when it is to be done. Often, these agreements are expressed in documented business systems.
2. Any changes in the work requirements are made only after mutual agreement between the manager and the employee.

The employee takes full accountability for performing the work and achieving the results as agreed, and the manager is accountable for providing the employee with the resources and guidance needed.

Exceptions are reported immediately. The employee is accountable for notifying the manager, and any other affected people, in writing if the work will not be performed or the results will not be achieved as agreed. The manager also notifies the employee if commitments made by the manager cannot be achieved.

The manager can assume the work is being performed as agreed unless otherwise notified.

Periodic check-ins between the employee and manager, called "reporting loops", are the main vehicle for keeping each other informed about how work is progressing.

Failure to notify of exceptions or missed dues dates - in other words, silence - is not acceptable.

Relationships built on trust are developed as managers and employees keep their commitments and successful results are achieved.

Guidelines for Working Interactions

The guidelines for working interactions are a set of operating procedures that establish standards for interpersonal communication at work so that people can achieve results without conflicts or ambiguity.

The type of organizational relationship you're in with another person, line or staff, will guide your working interactions.

Directives should only come from your manager. Directives are any information, requests or delegations that would cause you to take action or change the course of your actions.

If a directive is given to you by someone other than your manager that feels inappropriate or intrusive, or would cause you to be unable to meet a prior agreement, you should refer the person to your manager.

Everyone in the company has one, and only one, primary manager.

Owners who work in the business must assume positions on the organization chart and act according to the line and staff relationships defined by those positions.

Everyone will respect each other's time, space, and need for concentration. Socializing will not impede anyone's work activities.

When a manager is absent from the workplace, temporary authority for his or her reporting employees goes to the next higher position in the "line".

Service relationships do not supersede, conflict with, or comprise line relationships. Service systems will be developed and used to manage service relationships effectively.

Guidelines for Effective Delegation

Identify work or result you want to delegate and determine to whom you'll delegate it.

Put the delegation in writing, with the due date.

Discuss the delegations with the employee whenever possible.

Get the employee's agreement.

Guidelines for Effective Regulation

Use periodic reporting loops to review work.

Give quick, clear, and direct feedback and instruction.

Communicate with each other in writing.

Avoid under-regulating, over-regulating, reverse delegation, and unnecessary meetings.

Tuition Reimbursement - Template Policy

Purpose

{MYCOMPANY} supports employees who wish to further their education and prepare themselves for promotional opportunities. In keeping with this philosophy, {MYCOMPANY} has established a reimbursement program for expenses incurred through approved institutions of learning for up to nine (9) hours of courses per semester; or, trimester systems will cap out at eighteen (18) hours per year. This program will reimburse participating employees for all employer approved tuition costs of approved courses and training after completion. {MYCOMPANY} will reimburse up to a maximum of $500.00 per semester incurred by an employee for continuing education through an accredited program that either offers growth in an area related to his or her current position or might lead to promotional opportunities. This can include college credit courses, continuing education unit courses, seminars and certification tests. ELIGIBILITY-You are eligible to participate in this program if you work thirty (30) or more hours per week, have successfully completed your probationary period, and, the courses are job-related.

Document

To apply for tuition reimbursement, follow the procedures below:

• Advise your manager as far in advance of course content, course dates and times, cost, and expected benefits to the Company.
• The Tuition Reimbursement Form should be completed and all the appropriate signatures obtained prior to enrolling.
• The employee should bring the form to the HR Department and a copy will be filed in the employee's file. The employee will maintain the original until he or she has completed the course.
• Upon satisfactory completion of an approved course, you must submit proof of payment, a grade report or certification, and original Tuition Reimbursement form to the HR Department. Satisfactory completion is defined as the equivalent of 'C' or better or 'P' if taken Pass/Fail to receive any reimbursement.
• {MYCOMPANY} will reimburse you 100% of the cost of enrollment/test up to $500.00, including books and other required material, after submission of the documentation described above.
• If travel/hotel costs are incurred for employment related tests/exams/seminars, {MYCOMPANY} may pay for cost upon prior HR approval.
• If employee terminates employment within one year after receipt of reimbursement, employee will be responsible to pay entire reimbursement cost back to {MYCOMPANY}.

Any questions or comments should be directed to the HR department.

Placing Projects on Hold

In a recent article titled 'Put it in park, then drive' Jack Vinson discusses the potential benefits to project driven organizations of placing certain projects on hold. This seems like a fairly obvious solution but in reality there are potential pitfalls. Primarily, it's likely you've established some sort of deadline with a client, so placing their project on hold may present a problem.

I know that in my world, it would be ideal to be able to work on one project until it was complete. There have been some occasions that we've had the luxury of doing this and the overall product generally ends up being better. Not to mention the resources required to finish the project are usually less than if the project is just one of many.

How could there ever be too many projects in progress? The main problem, which Jack alludes to, is that there always needs to be some 'work in the pipeline' to keep the operation running. If you were to work on one project at a time from start to finish and then start looking for the next project the likelihood is high that you would have gaps in production where people are not doing anything but waiting for the next project.

There is also the issue of having staff that work on different components of a project. If you have a project that requires X, Y, Z from your services it's hard to keep all of the people working on each of those components busy at the same time. The result is that you end up taking a new project on because the 'X' group needs work even though the 'Y' and 'Z' groups are overloaded.

I feel the real solution to being able to keep project oriented staff busy and maintain a decent backlog of work is to be able to accurately schedule resources. If you can do this successfully and communicate the situation up front to your clients you'll allow ample time to give projects the attention they need and hopefully avoid having to park a project once it is started.

Project Communication

It is a common assumption that project managers spend a majority of their time relaying information between project participants (i.e. 'communicating'). In a day and age where communication seems to be non-stop between phone, email, and IM conversations, communication isn't really the problem - the problem is organizing and documenting all of the information that's coming in. You may have a record of all these messages in their native format, but how do you present them for a client review or archive them for future reference?

I know from personal experience that some of the largest chunks of time for a project are taken up sifting through all of the communications, documenting issues and decisions, and reporting this information to the project owner.

KM Executive has a function that helps corral all of this information together into one bucket that makes it much simpler to review when the need arises to perform a review and produce a report. The 'comments' feature allows a task and/or file attachment entry attached to any task that is automatically date stamped. Any phone conversations are documented in this way. Meeting notes are scanned and attached. Critical email conversations are copied and pasted. The end result is a chronological log of all project activities that can be sorted and filtered according to the tags you use for your tasks.

Heirarchy of Knowledge

Procedural knowledge can be organized in a hierarchical structure to provide clarity and organization in terms of project management.

There are essentially five different levels.

1. Description of the end result desired - A broad description of the work to be performed.
2. Milestones - Breakdown of the end result into broad completion points.
3. Tasks - Breakdown of each milestone into general tasks defining intermediate deliverables.
4. Checklists - Define what needs to be included with the completion of each general task.
5. Documentation - Describe the requirements to complete each checklist item.

The relevant point relating to complex project management is this: Any type of project that is repeated within your organization should be formatted with this model in mind. The outline should be generic enough that you can apply it to any similar project, with the ability to fill in the outline with more detail pertaining to the project at hand. The benefits of this approach are two fold.

The most obvious benefit is to provide a framework for project completion. Your team won't be starting from scratch each time and will always have direction on what the organization standard is for finishing the project.

Perhaps less obvious is the benefit of innovation. By establishing this structure as a standard you have a framework that allows you to leave a note behind for yourself for the next time you come across a similar project. If the milestones, tasks, checklists, and documentation are all linked together and can be re-used there are distinct places to add information as you work through a particular project and discover something you may have missed in the initial process of outlining the procedure.

Company Knowledge Base as a Touchstone to Innovation

A simple definition for 'knowledge base' is a set of information organized by specific storage and retrieval protocols. When does information in your company formally become part of a knowledge base? Simply having information stored in folders on a server does not represent a very efficient knowledge base. However, it's my experience that this is the most common format in use.

I've found that virtually every organization has stakeholders that, given a forum, can provide ideas for how to improve their organization. I'm sure all of us have been part of a meeting that generated some great ideas only to find that as time passes people get busy and the ideas don't go anywhere because of lack of implementation. The ideas get lost. A common scenario is 'where did we put the notes from that meeting'?

The KMX Documents module was created with the intent of creating an easy entry point to add information to an organizational knowledge base. The concept is that the information from the type of meeting described above would be entered into the company 'knowledge base' immediately with no extra steps. Using tags and review assignments implementation becomes more probable. Revisions and comments are automatically tracked by date and user. More importantly, the original ideas are captured in a context that can be easily retrieved and cross referenced. The documents become a touchstone for innovation as changes are implemented within the organization.

Improvement Through Analyzation

In a previous posting I discussed the importance of Collecting Data to Improve Your Business. Having the data available you need for a thorough analysis of your business operation is certainly important, but it is only one component of the improvement process. Jack Vinison, in his post
Measures should drive the goal discusses the importance of knowing what to do with your data once you have collected it. The most prominent take a way from Jack's article for me is that if your measurements don't relate to getting things done faster there is no point in collecting them.

The KM Executive project and task management features were designed around the principle of measuring performance and being able to process the measurements seamlessly to both plan ahead and look back in time to discover weaknesses. Each of the bullet points that Jack identifies for project measurements are addresses in the following manner:

• Tasks (activities) automatically log who created the task and when along with a modifiable start and end date. Each task is allowed a time budget. Various reports allow easy reference to this information to determine how much time is left for a task, where the task is at in relation to schedule, etc.


• The ability to tag each activity and arrange reports by these tags provides a backward looking analysis of task performance. By using one tag to identify a project and separate tags to identify and group tasks it is easy to see at a glance which projects exceeded budget and then drill down further to identify which tasks or groups of tasks within the project caused the most problem. Through consistent tagging it is easy to look across multiple projects to identify specific areas that demand improvement. This allows you to focus your innovation efforts in the areas that will have the most impact on performance.


• Activity load reports provide a quick analysis of which resources are overloaded and which are underutilized.

The conclusion that the overall goal of project improvements is to be able to get projects done as quickly as possible is very poignant.

Is Your Software an Asset or a Liability?

Many people have the misconception that their house is an asset. The reality is that your house is a liability, assuming you don’t own it outright. If you have a mortgage, your house is an asset to your lender.

I believe this analogy applies to software that companies invest in. Under traditional software models a company makes a large up-front investment to purchase a software package. At that point the company views the software as an asset. The reality may be that the software is a liability. Time must be spent learning the software and integrating it into your company’s operation. Then you can start looking forward to steady outlays of cash to keep up with upgrades, patches, and support if required. Eventually companies reach a point that they cannot afford to switch to a new package even if they are not happy. The cost in time and money invested simply becomes too great to warrant any change.

These problems can be magnified if you are not getting the exact results you require from a specific application. Additional time needs to be spent to try to tweak the software to your needs, or additional manpower is required to massage the output into the format you need. Perhaps you even end up needing a second package altogether.

A specific example of this scenario I am familiar with involves an accounting software package. After paying the shocking sticker price and absorbing months and months of technical support and training time the software would not give us all of the reports we needed. We could not absorb the same type of hit to 'try' a new package so we had to set up a parallel manual system that would glean the information we required. At the end of the day, this software package did not save any money and indeed increased operating costs.

A company's real asset is it's information. A more practical model is to be able to control your information and have the ability to transfer it between software packages that fit your needs. Or, equally important, be able to try different solutions inexpensively to see what fits best. The emergence of Software As A Service shows promise in both regards. Although there is still a long way to go to standardize the data used for these packages, the idea of being able to pay a small periodic fee to manipulate your data in a manner that best suits your needs is definitely the wave of the future. Faster feature upgrade and bug fix cycles also make Saas ideal for providing a connection between the features you need and the software developer.

USA Today, in the article Software-as-a-service gives small business powerful tools calls attention to the fact that SaaS applications are growing into a legitimate solution for any size business. The fact that this growing field of applications can allow small business to "go toe-to-toe with big business" should not be overlooked.

Collecting Data to Improve Your Business

In his New York Times Magazine article 'The Data-Driven Life' Gary Wolf illustrates a very interesting view on data collection. I found a couple of particular clips from that article that relate directly to business:

"We have blind spots in our field of vision and gaps in our stream of attention....These weaknesses put us at a disadvantage. We make decisions with partial information. We are forced to steer by guesswork. We go with our gut."

"If you want to replace the vagaries of intuition with something more reliable, you first need to gather data."

This human characteristic led to the creation of KM Executive. In order to make informed decisions about the operation of your business you need to be able to see trends and in order to see trends you need to be able to track information. People are not apt to do this on their own no matter how many forms or how much paperwork you try to force them to fill out. I believe this is because people somehow know they are not going to like what they see. The idea is to have a way to glean information from the stream of data that your business generates by doing what it does.

KMX was initially established as a tool to organize business process documentation, with a focus on systematic improvement. We soon realized that the tracking of metrics required to measure improvement had to be closely tied to the documentation system if people were going to use it. Ultimately we concluded that both of these processes must be an integrated part of the operation's daily workflow so that people were not maintaining two systems. We learned that if people had to go very far out of their way to contribute to system improvement they were less likely to do so. What the company ends up with, in that event, is partial information.

Additionally, people generally do have a poor sense of time. Gathering precise data about where time is going is the objective. For many businesses time is going to be the primary metric of the effectiveness of a business process. KMX integrates project, task, time, and process management into one tool that allows businesses to capture and track the data they need to implement innovative change.

Invoice Request Form

KMX Forms are powerful tools ideally suited to track and communicate information within your organization. One example of a practical application of a form is an Invoice Request Form intended for a professional service company that issues invoices on a periodic basis. This form includes both reference fields that link to other forms, contacts, etc. and manual fields.

The example form shown below centers around a process in which a project manager makes a request to a billing manager to issue an invoice. The PM selects the correct budget to reference, fills in the amount to be billed based on applicable time/billing rate entries, and submits the form. Once that function has been performed the status field is used to communicate information and direct activity.














The status options used for this example are:

1. Submitted
2. Ready for Invoice
3. Invoice Prepared
4. Sent
5. Invoice Entered by Accounting
6. Full Payment Received
7. Partial Payment Received
8. Full Payment Posted
9. Partial Payment Posted

Each change of the status field creates specific tasks for individuals to take actions required to complete the invoicing process.

Email support@kmexecutive.com to find out how you can implement a similar system with your KM Executive account.

Gathering Company Knowledge

Every company produces information through the course of daily operations that can be used to improve productivity and efficiency. This information is the core of your company knowledge. If stored and indexed correctly this information can become a powerful component of your innovation strategy.

How is this information collected in your company and what do you do with it? How high is your barrier to entry? Do people write down phone numbers on sticky notes (low barrier) or enter them into a complex company database (high barrier)?

Where you set this barrier will directly affect the integration of the collection and use of data into your company culture. Set the barrier too low and secondary processing will be required (i.e. someone will need to enter the phone number into a system from the sticky note) before the information can be shared. Set the barrier too high and people won't use it on a consistent basis (i.e. pausing a phone conversation to load a database). The goal should be to keep the barrier as low as possible and still be able to access and process relevant data immediately after it is entered. Ride the line between a process that easily fits into the workflow habits of your company and at the same time stores and processes information to give you the picture you need of how your company is operating.

The KM Executive suite was first developed as a tool for documenting and innovating procedures based on interaction with the people that used the suite. In order to ensure this interaction it became apparent that the suite could not operate in a different sphere from daily operations. If someone is required to write, review, or comply with an operational document they need to be able to do that using the same tools they used to perform their normal operational functions. More importantly, people need to be able to record observations about a process into a tool that will not require additional processing. Emailing a co-worker about an idea to improve a process is not a bad thing, but that email needs to be processed by someone on some level to become part of an innovated process. In other words the tactical work of the organization needs to mesh with the operational work to maximize efficiency in the innovation process.

KMX considers how the tactical and operational tasks of your business are separated and the time you may be spending getting these two functions to talk to each other. Explore how the KM Executive assignments, forms, and documents can be combined to eliminate this wasted time.