The Manager's Resource Handbook
Tools, Resources and Guides for Managers and Business Leaders. Real Advice from Real Bosses.
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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Should I Let Employees Work From Home? Compared to just 15 years ago, the widespread availability of Wi-Fi, tablets, video conferences and smart phones have made the world our office. Many jobs no longer require employees to be housed within the same four walls since they can connect virtually, just as if they were sitting at a desk in a high-rise office
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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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How to Create an Executive Summary Raise your hand if you have ever sat through a presentation and walked away not understanding its core message. Now, raise your hand if you’ve ever asked an employee to give you a project briefing, only for them to bury you in data, facts and graphics. Finally, raise your hand if you’ve ever picked
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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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A Basic Outline to An RFP Response When conducting business between companies, typically referred to as business-to-business or B2B, most opportunities and contracts are generated through a process of bid solicitation. Businesses looking to outsource services will often issue what is known as a Request for Proposal (RFP) to seek information from various vendors and suppliers who they believe can do the
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Estimating the Cost of a New Hire Fighting for resources is a frustrating problem we’ve all dealt with as managers and business leaders. Every one of us has said it at one point or another: ‘Too much to do, not enough people to do it.’ Justifying more staff is certainly difficult, but it is possible when you create a
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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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8 Questions To Help You Delegate Many managers take on too much because they don’t know to delegate work effectively. They are told they should delegate more, but still struggle to do it. I was definitely in this category when I first became a manager, and always struggled to ask for help. Often times, you’ll hear employees say something like this:
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Here is What You Need To Do When the Sky Is Falling If you have not yet experienced it in your career, you will at some point. Managing a crisis at work is difficult for even the most skilled of leaders. Every time I think of such situations, I imagine that scene in the movie Apollo 13, when NASA controllers place
» Read more How to Build a Department Budget If you’ve ever had to build a budget for work, you know the stress, headache and aggravation it often entails. If you have not, well, consider yourself lucky. Either way, every leader knows that fiscal management is important and that our stakeholders depend on us to manage within a budget – our team, our shareholders, and in some
» Read more 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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Why Consider a Horizontal Integration Strategy? Just about every firm continuously tweaks and looks for new ways to optimize their operation in the pursuit of growth and profits. In the early 2000s, made even more possible by a rapidly expanding internet, just about every industry seemed to jump on the outsourcing bandwagon. The thought was simple: why expend internal resources on
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Create Slides That Manage Your Message Every organization holds periodic management reviews of current programs, projects and initiatives. We have all experienced them: we share the current financial outlook of a project compared to the initial plan, we identify any changes in strategic direction, and we highlight to the executives any new challenges that have emerged. Of course, the overall intent of such internal reviews
» Read more Overcoming the Frustration of Being Under Staffed How many times have you seen a colleague ask for more resources? After all, their team was very busy and they could really use some more people. You’ve probably witnessed that discussion more times than you can count. Now, how many times have you heard the person they were asking – their own manager,
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How to Estimate Hours for a New Project How many times have you been asked the question “It’s going to take you how long?” when you present an estimate of hours required for a new project? Regardless of whether it is your customer or a fellow manager, the conversation is often the same. As the expert, you anticipate the project will
» Read more Why Your Employees Need to Learn the Local Culture As technology advances, the world gets smaller and smaller. Email, conference calls and WeChat offer us instant communication to opposite ends of the globe. Whether you routinely jet set to far away places to meet with your customers, or you never leave your comfort of your office, working alongside people from another culture
» Read more How to Present Information to Your Target Audience We’ve all experienced it. We ask for an update and our employee who sits just three offices down writes you an email that takes them an hour to write, and you 20 minutes to read. Or, we get 4 attachments full of data and numbers that clog our inbox. The concept of audience is taught
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Research and Development Spending: Where Did the Money Go? I recently read Borderless World by Kenichi Ohmae in which he discusses the approaches companies take in terms of their technology growth and research investment. In his book, Ohmae highlights the differences between companies that truly flood the pipeline with investment, and those that play the betting game with a handful of specific projects. Having
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