Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

PRODUCTION

Sooner or later, we have to stop planning and begin to produce. All of our plans and resources need to be brought to bear on the job. Some people like to talk about new titles for HR professionals, such as caregiver, casting director, deal maker, systems integrator. That is fine and somewhat titillating, but as a top executive at a major bank once said to a group of branch managers I was training, “There are lots of questions we could ask and criticisms we could make, but eventually we have to put our heads down and go to work.” Talk is cheap. Performance is mandatory.

Daily, we face performance issues such as these:

• What should we do to improve the quality of our hires?
• How can we use incentive pay to stimulate performance?
• What types of training would be most effective for this group?
• How do we encourage people be more engaged?
• How can we improve the level of leadership?
• What can we do to manage the retention of mission-critical people?

The third step in our model deals with how to analyze and improve processes.