Category Archives: People

Helping A Great Team Think & Act Differently

Total Clothing wanted to involve people from right across the team to streamline their processes, to prepare in advance for another year of major growth. They asked Critical Action to help with building vision, identifying changes and putting a plan into action.

“We worked with many of our team, led by Keith, to identify bottlenecks in our processes and by voting on the most urgent issues, gave everyone a sense of inclusion and buy-in.

It has brought the team so much closer in terms of working towards common goals and also in the way they communicate with each other on an ongoing basis.

We are really thinking differently as a team about the way we operate and this is translating into actions and profitability.

Keith’s no nonsense, practical way of facilitating, managing and ensuring that tasks were completed by all has really helped us overcome some challenging issues and we are moving forward with some exciting times ahead.”

Jan Richardson
Managing Director, Total Clothing Ltd

https://www.totalclothing.co.uk

Role Based Access – CIO White Paper

We’ve been doing a fair bit of work recently around roles and role-based access.

These projects have been around things like Active Directory, new ERP/CRM systems implementations, changes to responsibilities and working processes, and data migrations.

If this sounds like something you’re about to embark upon, and you’d like some assistance with the analysis and logical design, to feed into your technical design, you might find our short role-based permission white-paper gives you some food for thought.

Download the paper here.

Over a few pages, we share a summary of our thinking, observations and ideas for why role-based access is good, what sort of questions to ask, and how to map roles to groups to permissions.

We’d be delighted to talk you through our approach in more detail if you’d like to contact us.

Managing Staff with GoalStormer

We wanted to mention a new feature of our GoalStormer platform, for those of you who manage staff performance.

It’s important to discuss, agree, set and track goals with your people; but it can be time consuming to keep on top of, and often suffers at the hands of other day-to-day priorities.

That’s why we’ve introduced automatic scheduled reports into the GoalStormer ProHub (for Pro account users).

For users in your groups, or who have set you as a coach, you can already generate progress summary reports on demand. We’ve added a new “Schedule” button. This lets you pick a day of the month and a “how many months” frequency for reports to be generated and emailed to you as a PDF. You can do this per user, and you can switch the schedules on and off individually.

This means once you’ve agreed initial goals with users, you can sit back and let GoalStormer remind and inform you when it’s time to review progress with individuals.

ReportScheduleForm

Simple, but effective. Just how we like it!

What We Look For In People

I was flicking through some old day-books last week, as I was doing some business plan review work for Critical Action. I came across some notes I made on “what we look for in our people” for use during recruitment and helping clients with interviews.

Here were my three “top picks”:

  • Be a miniature force of nature – whether the blast of the hurricane, the constant shift of the tides or the inexorable force of tectonic shift – look for that attitude in someone that says “it will get done”; and look to balance the forces at play across your team to meet all situations.
  • Have the humility to listen, learn and share every day – even when we are bringing our own knowledge to bear, we are always learning – new knowledge, new ways of understanding customer needs, new client pressures, new market developments.
  • Earn and have the confidence to hold the room – our clients often look to us for leadership and to help them arrive at decisions; to do this well, we need to have done the ground work in the years, weeks, hours and minutes beforehand – and then to share our honest thoughts.

Of course, there are always many other role-specific or “technical” areas to explore – but for me, these come secondary to these top three.