Development Solutions Consultancy

In any organization every employee is serving someone. Every employee has customers to serve. Customers are the very reason for everyone's employment. For each employee, the most important thing is not knowing what to do but knowing what service to deliver to one's customers. It is very easy for employees to get swamped into implementing activities without clarity of the customers they serve and the service they deliver. Knowing the customers and the service to be delivered is key to understanding the value customers and the organization as a whole attach to the employee. Most employees think that they are employed to do things instead of to deliver services.

Understanding one's customers, the services to be delivered and delivering them in the right quantities, quality, time, and in the most economical way possible is key. It is a sure way of not only commanding one's relevance and demand in the organization but also contributing to organizational success. Invariably, an organization has two types of customers; external customers and internal customers. External customers are found in the market place and they are the primary reason for the organization's existence. Any organization exists to create and serve external customers. Organizations create and increase external customers by delivering what they value. Continue reading...

Reading different books and listening to various podcasts on entrepreneurship and personal development is something I enjoy doing often. The information I get from these sources greatly aids me in expanding my thinking and it also continuously serves as a reminder that life is full of many possibilities if one is willing to put forth the work.

One podcast I particularly like is "Entrepreneur on Fire" hosted by John Lee Dumas, which can easily be found on iTunes. His whole podcast is based on interviewing successful entrepreneurs who have and are continuing to make a significant impact in the world. I have noticed two practices that have been very consistent amongst successful entrepreneurs in the 50 or so episodes that I have listened to. As you will see shortly, these two practices or qualities will greatly aid any person who wants to be successful in any endeavor.

These entrepreneurs had a basic idea of what they wanted to accomplish, surprisingly in most cases, it wasn't so clear but they started fast and they stayed focused. The two key words I want to bring to your attention here is start and focus. Continue reading...

I have, often enough, come across the terms Key Performance Areas (KPAs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) used in organizational planning particularly in strategic planning by public or service organizations. However, quite often they are used incorrectly something that has prompted me to make this small contribution. So, what are KPAs and KPIs?

To understand KPIs one has to first understand KPAs, in terms of what they are and where they are found, which then paves the way to understanding KPIs. The key word in both terms is performance. Performance is a description of achievement in the market place or in relation to customers. An athlete will have put up excellent performance if they won a gold medal. The medal is symbolic but the real value is the pleasure they give the fans and spectators for running the fastest. The service provided is entertainment.

In organizational terms performance is about delivery of products or services that have economic value to beneficiaries or customers. Continue reading...

We all agree that performance is about results. It is about delivering the results or service expected by customers. Depending on your position in the organization you may be serving external or internal customers. Both have similar needs in that they need your service; and they need it so much that they are desperate if you do not deliver it in time. However, the service delivery process has considerable interconnections that need consideration in ensuring an employee's effective and sustained performance.

Performance is not just delivering that service or results. Effective and sustained performance is also about relationships; it is about connections and networking as much as it is also about accountability. In this multi-dimensional context, performance is not just about being accountable to your boss about deliverables and their deadlines. It is first and foremost about timely meeting customer needs, which one often achieves in the absence of the boss, and about relationships with peers, reports and suppliers of products or services because they matter in the effective service delivery process.

Under the circumstances it is not enough to account for results to one's "boss" during a performance appraisal as this is done in the absence of the customer. To get a good and total employee performance picture the boss needs to know what results or services were delivered, speed of delivery, the extent of customer and stakeholder satisfaction. This requires the various stakeholders attesting the individual's performance in terms of customer service and work relationships. Continue reading...

One thing I particularly like about staff performance appraisal is that designed properly it is the one thing that is an indicator of how well many other things are harmoniously working in the organization. Performance does not simply happen; it is a result of many systems working well together in the organization. For example it is an indicator of how well staff training, coaching, planning, delegation and leadership are working together by re-enforcing one another.

An effective staff performance appraisal is also an indicator of change as it should be able to show performance trend of the organization over a given period of time. Such performance trend would indicate the extent to which the various interventions the organization has put in place are working well together. And where else is the best place to check for this rather than at the organization's unit of performance; the individual staff level? So what can and should determine value of a performance appraisal system?

First of all a staff performance appraisal should be viewed as an integral part of the whole performance management system. Continue reading...

Often when people hear the word "sales", they immediately think of the pushy sales person who is trying to pressure and convince them into buying a product or a service. Many people have certainly bought things unintentionally from such pressures only to regret on the expense later. However, the fact of the matter is that, people like to be sold but they don't like to be pressured. People enjoy getting value for their time and money and therefore, having the right sales people is quite important. From this premise, I would like to argue that we are all in sales. Whether we know it or not we are always selling something; a product, a service, a story, an idea, a principle or even ourselves just to name a few things.

Do you know that in any conversation one is selling and another is buying something? This makes the ability to sell a very important skill because without it, virtually nothing will get done. Continue reading...