The Manager's Resource Handbook
Tools, Resources and Guides for Managers and Business Leaders. Real Advice from Real Bosses.
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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10 Core Components of Thinking Strategically In management and leaderships ranks, we often talk about the need to think and act strategically. We even tell our employees to do the same thing. But many managers struggle to explain what this really means or how employees can improve their strategic thinking skills. In truth, you can’t just tell your employees to
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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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When Your Customer Makes You Cringe: Dealing With Unprofessional Clients During a recent meeting with a client, my patience grew to its thinnest level yet in our working relationship. They were unhappy with schedule, but they were the cause for the delays. They were dissatisfied with our solution to their problem, but it was driven by their written guidelines. They
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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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67 Brilliant Principles That Will Make You a Better Manager Every now and then we stumble upon a series of words which hold such powerful meaning and contain such genius that they remain with us for the rest of our lives. Such profound ideas may have jumped out at us from the inner pages of a book, the title of
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How to Negotiate and Manage Customer Requirements Seven years ago, my company was on the losing end of a $4 Million settlement. I could write a lengthy explanation as to how things got there, but it came down to one very simple thing: we gave our customer what we thought they wanted, not what they said they wanted. It was
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Before the RFP: Key Messages That Position You for Success Winning a contract comes down to finding mutual value between you and the client. The concept of value goes beyond the financial numbers, though, and is really a combination of price, product, services and trust. When you receive a Request for Proposal (RFP) from a client, how do you demonstrate the value you can
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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 Essential Project Management Resources If you think about the best project manager you know, chances are he or she shares some common traits. For starters, successful project leaders are typically very well organized. Additionally, they are often great communicators, and they can remain calm under pressure. Despite these great talents, though, even the best project managers need help to bring about
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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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Manager’s Guide to Better Email Writing Even in the age of Facebook, Twitter and text messaging, email is still at the core of modern business communication. We use email to communicate to our customers, our suppliers, our employees and our superiors. We use it to send mass-communication to our entire organization, and we use email to contact a single recipient. Moreover, according
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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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Isn’t the Customer Always Right? Actually, no, they aren’t! In the B2B space, we often find ourselves working with clients and customers to develop and sell our products and services. And yet, sometimes, things do not always go as planned. I recently paid a visit to one customer who has started to change the rules as they go. Despite the contractual commitments
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The Difference Between Internal and External Customers Several years ago, I was asked a very simple question: “Who is your customer?” Perhaps I was naïve, or maybe just ignorant, but I replied to the simple question with an equally simple answer: “The people who pay our company money for our products and services.” He clearly expected my response, because the
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15 REAL Tips for Working in China Having returned from a trip to China earlier this week, I wanted to take a few minutes to share some learnings about how to conduct meetings and work with your customer in the People’s Republic. Despite some concerns and disagreements before our arrival, my team was made up of several veterans when
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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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If there is one thing that every manager has in common, it’s that we’ve all dealt with employee performance issues. Every one of us has a Susan, who always does everything right and never makes a mistake. And then, we all have a Michael, who struggles to get it together. Michael’s performance problems never seem to go away and managing
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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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