The Manager's Resource Handbook
Tools, Resources and Guides for Managers and Business Leaders. Real Advice from Real Bosses.
MRH Mailbag: Advice from Our Experts When I first began leading and managing a team, I was caught off guard by the number of unique and unusual challenges I faced on a daily basis. In the span of a given week, I found myself addressing everything from budget issues, to personnel matters, to customer inquiries. No two days were alike.
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How to Make Sure Customer Requests Don’t Eat Up Your Profits When you bid on a new project, you make assumptions, estimate your costs, factor in some potential risks and contingency funds, and add profit. But inevitably, your customer asks for more and the scope, schedule and requirements begin to drift, increasing your costs and resource demands. If you try
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A Tutorial to Ensure You Meet Your Customer’s Needs and Don’t Forget the Details You’re about to wrap up a big project. You are proud of the work you’ve done, and you believe you covered everything the customer asked. Afterall, you spent a lot of time on it and you’re pretty sure the customer will be happy with it. But
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Don’t Let Your Project Fail: Practical Solutions for Small Business Even with a strong business case and what may be a routine scope, there are several pitfalls that can ruin great projects at any time. These challenges can adversely impact projects led by both first-time program managers, who may not be prepared enough for what lies ahead, as well as
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At one point or another, virtually every business must adapt to changing times. In some instances, your product offering becomes stagnant. Perhaps your competitor has unveiled something new and is taking market share away from you. And, from time to time, technology advancements will make your current products and services obsolete. In all cases, we as business leaders must respond in such
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21 Expert Tips for Increasing Workplace Productivity If boosting your department’s throughput were as easy as flipping a switch, every boss’s job would be infinitely simpler. Unfortunately, that’s far from reality. Further, as an old colleague of mine used to say, “Asking people to work harder is not a solution.” In the proven strategies that follow, we will illustrate how
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Is Managing Change The Ultimate Program Management Challenge? For 18 months now, my team has been negotiating scope changes with a given client to offset our increases in cost. Per our contract, we have the right to seek commercial coverage and have the ability to charge the customer for change. We went into this particular business deal expecting delays before all was said and
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10 Easy Steps to Estimate the Cost of Risk Whether we are developing something new for a customer, or leading an initiative to improve the company, every project we undertake contains some level of uncertainty. Because of this, and particularly when the stakes are high, some level of risk analysis is always a good idea. However, managing risk means more than
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A little while back we posted an article about writing a reply to an RFP (Request for Proposal), which provided a basic outline for responding to potential clients. Since then, we have received a lot of questions from the MRH community asking for details on formats to use as well as what sort of sections and content to include. So, we wanted
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When I became a project manager, the first thing I did was print out a bunch of documents, the Statement of Work, some spreadsheets with basic financial information and put it all in a well-organized 3-ring binder. Beyond that, I didn’t know what I was doing. So I just got down to work. That was 20 years ago and since that time, I’ve learned a
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Writing SMART Goals for Employees (With Examples) A colleague once told me “I have a really important goal in life…I want to climb Mt. Everest, someday.” While he was absolutely serious in his demeanor and spoke at length about why he wanted to do it, the short conversation revealed he had never done any climbing before. Further, he had hardly done research into
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Tips for Hiring and Retaining Employees in Developing Nations Whether you’re hiring in India, recruiting in China, or opening an office in the Philippines, the obstacles are often the same. Because of their rapid growth, hiring and staffing a team in an emerging economy will always present unique challenges in terms of language, skills and retention. But if you equip
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How I Cut the Cost of Training My Employees in Half Many managers are familiar with the old 70, 20, 10 Rule for employee development. The Rule suggests that 70% of an employee’s development should be learning-by-doing while 20% should be through mentoring. According to this principle, the last 10% of an employee’s growth and development should be the result of
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The 7 Rules of Process Development and Implementation Your growing business has a great product, friendly customer service, happy clients and cash. What’s missing? An often forgotten ingredient to a well-run business is the development and implementation of the processes that serve as the backbone for a company. Developing effective business processes makes your internal activities repeatable and consistent. And the more stable your
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Questions for Building a Business Case Any manager who has hired new employees has dealt with challenges related to wages. Why else do recruiters ask for a candidates salary as part of the initial screening process? What they’re really asking is “can I afford you?” I actually had one hiring manager tell me “This guy is making more than I do, we could never
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Managing Crisis in the Workplace None of us had any idea that it was the first day of what would become a 10 month, $25 Million investigation. It was late in the afternoon on a cool fall day when the Quality Assurance Manager and the Operations Manager came to my office with a concern over a product defect that had
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Common Product Development Mistakes to Avoid and How to Steer Clear Several years ago, after doubling down on our investments, running wild with our tests and sprinting through patents to make sure we would be the first to market, we were finally ready to present our new technology to our target customer – a major global airline. After spending $3
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Hitting Your Metrics: Reducing the Impossible to the Possible Every year, companies and businesses establish their annual goals and performance targets. At some point in time, responsibility for achieving those objectives is placed into the hands of managers and individual teams, sometimes, with minimal direction. Though just about every organization has a standard set of metrics, many managers still struggle to map
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Tips for Conducting a Technical Design Review When it comes to the product development cycle and a phase gated design process, holding robust technical design reviews is critical to a project’s success. While there are various types of design reviews that lend themselves to different technologies and industries, the most common and universal examples include the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) and Critical Design Review
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What Is Structured Problem Solving and Why Use It? I was asked to attend a meeting by the manufacturing manager. “We have a problem” he said. He had been alerted to a defect with hardware being processed through the production floor. Initial information suggested that during some of the molding processes, some parts were noted to have cracked while the molten
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