Enjoy More Benefits by Accomplishing More Sooner -SCARCE RESOURCE MANAGEMENT-

1. Write down the 10 most important challenges your organization has faced in the last 2-3 years. (If you find the pre diagnosis questions helpful, feel free to do more and over a longer period of time.) Next, recall as best you can how effectively each challenge was met in terms of these two dimensions:

   a. What percentage of the potential benefits were gained by your organization’s response to each challenge?

   b. How close did you come to the original targeted time for completion of the company’s response?

2. Looking at those cases where the percentage of benefits obtained was unsatisfactory or the response came late, consider how missing or insufficient resources (such as knowledge, skills, management processes, time of key people, facilities, money, distribution, customer image, and clout in the market place) contributed to these shortfalls:

   a. What resources were needed that were not available at all?

   b. What resources were available in insufficient amounts?

   c. What resources were available in sufficient quantities, but not soon enough?

3. What was the cost of the lost benefits? What you are measuring is the difference between what the benefits could realistically have been and what was actual received. In measuring what was missed, be sure to include potential direct and indirect benefits. A potential direct benefit might have been profits that could have been received from a better execution, and a potential indirect benefit might have been the profits that would have been received because of how much more successful the company would have been in comparable activities following its success in this area.

4. How did the cost of the missing or delayed resources compare to the size of the lost direct and indirect benefits?

5. Is there a pattern to the types of missing and delayed resources for your organization? Does this pattern suggest any type of action to eliminate the pattern in the future? For example, if you are always missing certain types of technical skills, could that be related to how you define the types of people to hire, how you search for job candidates, or something about the career paths you offer?

Developed by Veritable Infusion