A panel discussion with Judy Hobrough, Richard Sale, Don Fowke, and Lois Melbourne
Speaker A Yes, I'm Judy Hobrough, I run BIOSS Europe, so part of the BIOS team and have been working with BIOS for about 20 years, really in one form or another. What we wanted to do this morning was to show you both an organizational tool and also, as Richard said, the individual assessment tools. And the whole technology movement within BIOSS you can't hear because I've been consulting for so long, I have a pretty hard time hearing no, Bonnie, not at all. Thanks for that. Now I was just saying that the whole technology movement is something that's quite new, I think, within BIOSS within the last five years. And we are still doing a lot of development. So whilst we're going to show you the organization development tool, and Rich is going to show you the individual ones, we haven't yet, and we're talking about it, working on it, bringing them together into one so that you can sort of switch from one to the other. We've always done a lot of organizational design work, much as you have here, but one of the things that we felt was missing was a tool. Our market likes to have tools, it likes to have something it can see, it likes to have the objectivity. So we developed about 18 months ago, or started development 18 months ago, so it's still relatively new, what we call the BIOSS mapper. And so this is just do this. Richard right. So this is an internet or internet or intranet based tool. That means that either people can use it through us or we license it to clients. And we have a couple of clients who have an organizational license to use this. So they pay a license fee and then they have unlimited access to it. What the tool does is it enables you to capture the overall purpose and key accountability for each job and it will assess and graphically represent the work level. It develops detailed job profiles, so not only of the job that's there now, but actually it enables you also to design new jobs. And you can compare and contrast job profiles. You can locate jobs within a division or there's the organizational is there going to be a handout for this? We haven't got one, but I can email stuff to you. Okay, absolutely. And the organizational charting bit, we have an association with a charting company, so unfortunately I can't show you the charting bit, but I think you probably all can imagine what organizations or charts look like. But that's a bolt on facility to the program. And so it enables you to map accountability so you're able to kind of look at the work through the spine and across the organization. In developing this, we looked at what we thought were the key dimensions of work and came up with the seven dimensions of work. And you can see these here. So it's what discretion does the role have, what resources, what sort of problems do people have to solve? What is the context, what time horizon are they working along? What is the collaborations of where do they have to interact with other people? And what is the key value contribution of that role to the business? And then what we have done in each one of those is there's a whole series of questions that have been written that are level specific. So the three key elements is the accountability profile which we talked about, the assessment of the job against those seven dimensions. So when you're working through with someone understanding and gathering data about their role, what as you'll see later this presents you with, is a map of that role in terms of at what level of complexity does it sit?
Speaker B Judy this would be filled out by the incumbent.
Speaker A It would be filled out by somebody who'd been trained, who had a good understanding of levels of work and they would work with the individual. Now that might be consultant or it might be somebody internally who had been through a training program both around levels of work and also around the use of the software. So there is an initial screen which asks some questions, some general questions about the role. Because clearly if you're working with we're working with six levels here and you've got a whole stack of questions on each of those levels, it would be very timely to sort of go through a whole stack. So this gives you an initial and then what the system does will start to ask you questions around that particular level. So if you think the role is roundabout level three and you were to well, this one's been ticked at strategic development, it will be questions around that that will be offered to you first of all. And then you can go up and down from that. Does that make sense? That's clear. I do have to say that I'm not one of the members of my team who's really an absolute whiz on this system. So if you have any questions I can't answer, I'll get back to you. So the next screen that comes up will be to click on one of the dimensions and then it will present you with a series of questions that need to be answered. So this is a sample of the sorts of questions that would come up around value contribution that you would need to answer. Are they readable? Because it's quite small print, I tried to make them as big as possible. So it presents you with a series of questions that you need to answer. It also provides you with an opportunity to give some text around the questions that you're answering. This is a picture, this is one of the outputs then from mappers. So when you've worked through all of those questions in all of those areas, you will get a map. Now, I'm not sure how quite how sorry, quite how clear this is. If you can see that on Value contribution, the way the questions were answered reflect that this job was actually in work level four. That was what we would call a strategic development role. The same with resources, the same with problem solving and discretion. But when it comes to collaboration, the level of complexity of the role drops back. So the context is also at a higher level and the time horizon drops back. So then you start to think about why might that be happening all the time? You're checking above and below. It also enables you to compare roles so you can list this particular chart compares the role of the regional chief officer in this organization and the general manager in the retail operation. So you can see how the first role, the value contribution, the role comes out at level three. And for the GM retail operations on Value, their contribution would be at work level four. Is that clear enough? Can you see that on the screen? And then there is the organizational charting facility. So we've just looked at some of the major benefits and how you can use Mapper. One of the things we do find is that it provides this objective and very transparent description of the jobs that enables you to go back and work through with people. So if somebody says, well, I don't think my role is at level three, I thought it was at level four, then you can start to look and say, okay, let's actually look at how you've answered that. And what it enables you to do as well is to track the accountability so you can start to see where some of the overlaps are as well. So you can identify situations where maybe two or three people have got the same.
Speaker C This is web enabled. Is this something you can access through the web?
Speaker A Yes.
Speaker C Do you have a demo version that somebody can engage for a period of time?
Speaker A Yes, we can set that up. Okay.
Speaker D Judy?
Speaker A Yes. The mapper experience. Yeah.
Speaker D No, in fact you just go to Biosura.com, you'll find the Mapper experience and all we ask is your email address and that will give you access to it'll.
Speaker A Okay. So it doesn't do the restructuring for you, but it does provide you with a support tool that enables you to map what's actually happening within the organization and then to think about how you start to make those sorts of changes that are required.
Speaker C Sorry, Glenn, is the organizational functional within.
Speaker A The no, no, it's not. We've been in discussions about whether we did this ourselves. Have anybody familiar with Nikisa, which is actually an American company. So what we've got at the moment is an arrangement with them is that as we do a major organizational design piece, we set up the arrangement with them to do the charting as well. So no, the only thing I've got is just the one screen at the moment Glenn is a demo.
Speaker C The reason I ask I'm particularly interested in charting that would be capable of manipulation.
Speaker A Tim Harding in the team would be the one alec can ask him and let you know because I haven't seen that bit.
Speaker D Work design terms then the facility to play tunes is an inherent part of what we're trying to do. We put a temporary partner but the power of the tool is partly that. We have a trained consultant with their business director and sit down and say well, what would this look like? And actually change the organization. That's very much part of the intention. The power of it in the experience we've had so far is in this comparison error both between jobs and in amongst those dimensions we have found where the senior person who's authorized to work has been astonished. I'm absolutely stunned that we've come up with all my regional representatives as level two. Very well. And we can then say, well, maybe it isn't just as simple as saying that level two. If you look at the spread of the dimensions here, it's quite close to three. On balance, it's too you've got a couple of dimensions which are clearly three, and that may be all the problem. You don't you're getting some underlap and overlap and it's kind of.
Speaker B Just for apologize to get to the charting process. Yeah that's driven by the outcomes coming out of the dimensions that then drive that to determine at what level the.
Speaker A Connections would be was when you've actually come up with a level of work that would be then mapped onto the organizational charting so you would actually have a map of where the roles sit within the levels.
Speaker B So is it the intention that that's an online outcome? If you have a person who's profiling.
Speaker A A role.
Speaker B Will they then see whether it be the manager or an incumbent they actually see this for their specific role, is that right there and then or how does that work?
Speaker A As soon as the information is put into the computer, into the system, then you get the picture out of the role. So as soon as the information is all in there it's calculated within the system. Okay. What I have done is copied what a job profile report looks like because you actually get a whole load of the profiles where you've got you can see it here. Job title. Who the immediate manager is the overall. Purpose, the key accountabilities and then this particular chart, although it hasn't shown up on colors because I copied it down from the website. That will give you the pattern of the role against the criteria, but then it also gives you how the questions were answered so you can actually work through and do a check. And also that starts to enable you to if you've got compression, to start to do some redesign around the accountabilities and where there are overlaps and where they may sit.
Speaker B So you've got a series of dimensions that may or may not be at the same level.
Speaker A Well, the system is designed, Bob, so that for each one of those dimensions, there are a series of questions around that dimension. So what is collaboration at one? At two, at three, at four? At five? It is six. And by answering the questions, you start to see how well designed the role is. Currently, are there areas where the individual's discretion is severely limited? And why is that happening? Because obviously, where there is quite a lot of compression, do you find that there is huge repetition in accountabilities and that there are some it's some of the authority levels that would line up. People don't have the discretion to do so.
Speaker B You come up with, say, a given role. On average, it's a level three thing, but you've got higher ratings on higher levels on task and lower on these tasks.
Speaker A Now, we all know that every role has a series of tasks of different levels of complexities, but it's really looking at the pattern and what are actually key to that role. And if there are differences, what is that telling you? Are people being pushed down there? Is there a duplication of that work taking place? So there's a whole lot of analysis that you need to do behind those results as well.
Speaker D Okay, I'm sorry, the latest apologies. I don't know if you covered this, Judy, but we don't normally use phrase representing organization in the biosurate context. It's implicit rather than explicit. So we will bring that kind of philosophy to the discussion on organization rather than building any visible roles. But what we found with Mapa is that it's a very practical way into effectively requisite discussions. So you've got the ammo, if you like to say, to a senior manager. In our experience, these two jobs are both level three and one reports to the other. In our experience, which is very considerable, that doesn't work very well. They are both effectively level three that is most unlikely to be a healthy organ, but because it's practical and actual rather than philosophical, we find it.
Speaker E There.
Speaker F Are we?
Speaker A Yeah, and I think he's just very quickly, because we need to pass over to you, to Richard, just building on that. When we're doing a major organizational design work, of course, the purpose is to get this organization as requisite as possible because we know that's how organizations function best. There may be some pragmatism along the way, but that would be the underlying philosophy. Thank you.
Speaker F Right. Want to switch focus completely now to look at the assessment of capability. And because we're very tight for time now, what I will try and do is give you a quick experience of what it would be like to go through this and what we can do with the data after we've collected it. EDAC is about computer based assessment and the internet we have a number of very clear and specific principles. The first one is that we separate the assessment from the feedback and the management of the data and that gives a primary security in what we do. So you go online to be assessed the results of that assessment then come by email to whoever it is who is responsible for managing the data, giving the feedback, whether that is a consultant or whether it's an organizational HR. And in doing that we are developing and following the International Test Commission guidelines which are about to be published on Best practice. So if you're asked wish to go through the KPD assessment, you come onto the website, you give your informed consent. So we set out basically the parameters against which we operate. So effectively we're making a contract with the candidate before they go through. You select the assessment that you want and you are led through. Because it's all server based, we can build in things like if you lose your internet link you go straight back to the last question that you were on. I'm not live online here so I'll now switch and show you how the actual questionnaire works. What we are asking the candidate to do is to look at a series of phrases and select the phrase that they agree with and the phrase that they disagree with and to make some commentary about it. This is the guts, the central part of the much longer face to face career path appreciation interview in the CPA. The cards are handed to you and you work with a trained practitioner working through them. What we effectively do with the online is we devolve that responsibility to the individual who goes online and goes through that process themselves. The reason why we ask people require people to type an explanation and those explanations can be vary from just a few terse comments to half an essay. There's no limit is we want to actually pin people to what they were thinking about at the time they went through the questionnaire. So rather than just asking them to pick an agree phrase and discard a disagree phrase and move on, we want to know what they were thinking about at the time. And you work through that and it normally takes about 45 minutes or so. The phrases appear in random order so that it cannot be templated. You see it's very simple to work your way through and when you reach the end you are asked a question about time. And what we're trying to do there you can read the question up on screen is just start to gather some information about what people think about the time span. Now.
Speaker G You can choose.
Speaker F From the drop down, whatever you like and move through. Now we have no idea really what an individual what they're thinking about when they're addressing this time frame question. Some people relate it directly to their work, some people will relate it to things like time to retirement, whatever it might be. And what this really brings up is that what we are doing in this process is collecting data which has to be confirmed. So once your candidate, who could be anywhere in the world has completed the questionnaire, the results come to you, the user. Whether you're a trained practitioner, whether you're a consultant or in an organization, you hold the computer program. So until that result is loaded up into the computer program, it is meaningless. Once you've loaded it up into the computer program, then you can review it. So you have a chance to go through and see what has been written, what selections have been made, prepare yourself for feedback and then you give feedback which is effectively a confirmatory interview. And that can be done ideally, face to face, but it can also be done at a distance because we use Web conferencing software to allow a candidate anywhere in the world to watch on their computer what you are doing on your computer and then you can talk to them. So if you're using Skype, it's a very, very low cost solution to give feedback at a distance. How do we do feedback? One of the benefits of working with a computer is that we can actually set up the conditions that require everybody who's using this piece of software to give the correct feedback in the correct sequence. So we call it a feedback wizard. It simply means that it's a piece of software which allows you to navigate in two directions only forward and back. So everybody who uses the MCPA and who is giving feedback does it in the same way and the correct way. So if you are now sitting down with your counselor practitioner or you are watching your computer screen and talking to them, if it's a remote location, you are simply taken through the responses that you made and the practitioner is coming to a sense or judgment or an opinion as to the level of capability that is being displayed. And that is a combination of looking at the phrases that were selected, looking at the language that is used to describe why that phrase was selected, and probing as necessary in order to get underneath that if there are any doubts or issues to be resolved. And you work your way through your feedback and you'll see that everything that the candidate typed is presented on the screen, you then come to the selection of time horizons and you explore with the candidate exactly what it is they meant by that. So in this case, far term, 15 years, what does that actually mean? Is the candidate actually talking about business decisions that they make? Or is the candidate perhaps saying I simply I retire in 15 years and I need to buy a new house or my last child graduates from university in 15 years and that's my long term? Once you have done that, you have the option to explore the theory or the construct with the candidate. We show a blank set of growth curves. We find that it is very useful often to be able to kind of settle people by showing them examples. So let us just say, because it's topical from this conference, we are looking at a military person. We can put on an overlay of senior officers at a military college. It's not a million miles away from where we are now. And what this shows is that even when you are looking at what an organization might believe to be a discrete group, in this case, every single person who is sent to this college is believed by the organization to have the potential to operate in this sort of area. Here you will see that actually the reality is far from the case. And this is a very powerful discriminating assessment here. If you actually talk to the faculty of the college, of course, they've known this for years, that they have a few stars, a majority of good solid people, and a minority who really don't need to be there at all. This is why I asked the question at the military presentation. If you can refine this and keep these sort of people out of a Senior Service College, then you're going to reduce the possibility of the organization picking them up and promoting them. Because there are many ways of impressing people at a Senior Service College which don't have anything to do with your capability.
Speaker E Sorry.
Speaker F Yes.
Speaker C In the process, you enter the data. The examiner goes through a process and goes to the practitioner. Is the algorithm in the server determining what the value is, or does the practitioner determine value based on the data?
Speaker F It's kind of like hypothesis testing. The algorithm actually in the computer program gives you an initial computer generated view, which you are then required to confirm. Okay, so it's like a guideline, and generally speaking, we find that it's about a 90% accuracy.
Speaker C I'm looking at a document by Kevin Distiller and Professor Mahara that you had posted on the website. Relationship between MTA Pay MCTA Data Score and Final Evaluation. And the note says it is currently necessary for qualified CPA. There's no date on this, so I don't think I'll hold it's currently necessary for qualified CPA. Practitioners currently matched emanating from the MCPA process in a validation interview?
Speaker F Yes.
Speaker C And the suggestion is you do a Career Appreciation interview as a confirmation.
Speaker F As I said in this, this is a two stage process. We're collecting data remotely from the candidate, and then we are confirming that with an interview.
Speaker C And then you have support so that they can give feedback at this result.
Speaker F Yes. So this is totally unlike a typical psychometric, where you simply go through there is a result, and then you talk to the candidate about the result. You collect data remotely from the candidate and then you confirm it in an interview, ideally face to face, but it can be done remotely as well. So there is a substantial training requirement and there is the exercise of judgment by the practitioner. And you cannot do it any other way. You cannot just take a computer generated score.
Speaker A It has to be confirmed, the confirmation of those responses.
Speaker B What you do is you go through.
Speaker A First of all, you look at all the responses. Does it feel as though have they misunderstood?
Speaker C The question might be coming up.
Speaker A And then what you do, you then just work through and you pick out key phrases. You ask for their thinking overall matches the.
Speaker E Computer.
Speaker B It's almost like a validation process.
Speaker A Yeah. How we validated that process.
Speaker F Yeah.
Speaker B Did I get it right? If I understood that in 10% of.
Speaker F The cases the practitioner will make some adjustments?
Speaker G Yes.
Speaker B 90%.
Speaker F Give or take. Give or take.
Speaker C I remember the original research had a point 75 correlation to the final result of the three process of CPA. And then they improved that somehow. So if you would say that even in the basics, there was a little difference, that probably is that 10% judgment.
Speaker F I'm sorry, I'm slightly deaf. I didn't quite get it.
Speaker C And now we're getting I don't want.
Speaker G To affect their time too well. We've got about five minutes left, Richard, so however you want.
Speaker F Let me skip through and finish the demonstration. Then we can come back. So we have the opportunity to go through the model, the paradigm with people and if necessary, and if it's helpful to show examples. And we then have the final result, which you can share with the candidate. And this simply shows the position of the candidate now, the growth curve on which the candidate lies and the assessment of their potential. And if you are doing this in the knowledge of the level of work, of the role, the candidate's role, we can then calculate the degree to which they are in flow. So in this particular case, we are looking at a candidate whose level of capability is very significantly higher than the role that they are actually in, and they are severely out of flow. If you do not have that level of information, then you are able to actually talk to the candidate about how they feel and display their perception of whether they're in flow or not. Because we do find this an enormously helpful construct, working with people because it underlies so much stress at work, unhappiness at work, the whole concept of flow, and then you're finished. Because it's a computer program, we can also do a number of things. And I'll very quickly just show you one of the facilities we have here. If you are looking at collective data now, you can load up teams from your database and you can look at the teams. It's particularly useful when you're presenting the data. You can identify who the people are, and you can project the results forward. So if you're looking to where these people are going to be in five years time, you can simply project them forward and you can see how that particular team or group is going to move, how their capabilities going to grow over time, and what impact that might have on the organization. I think that's about my time.
Speaker H That's great.
Speaker G Thank you.
Speaker E Richard?
Speaker G Yes?
Speaker A I've got one question. Having observed some of the longer version of the CPA, one of the things that came out that in certain organizations there are phrases that they use that have absolutely no relevance in anything, it's simply that the one that was most common was, I just use common sense.
Speaker F Right.
Speaker A And that was not a discriminator at all because that was the culture of that organization. You're doing this as individuals. Is there any way to pick that up? Or do you typically work with whole organization so that you can catch phrases that have no meaning?
Speaker F The phrases are set. So we use the same phrases absolutely everywhere. If you are using it in a large organization and something like that gets picked up, we can look at the item analysis, for example, and see the frequency with which people are picking various phrases over a large group, then we can alert practitioners. But you really hit on this key issue of why there has to be some kind of confirmatory session. Because if you're looking through that and you see people are generally picking phrases that would indicate, let us say, level four capability. But then suddenly a phrase that is completely out of kilter is being picked. If you're not there to actually interface with a candidate and discuss that and work your way through. If you were just relying on a computer to generate that score, it would skew the score. So it's really, really important. It's absolutely fundamental that that happens.
Speaker D Fascinating cases between the CPA two are the same. One of the ones that we don't use in the computer as version is use common sense because it's one that.
Speaker E So often picked up as irrelevant for level.
Speaker D But in the full CPA, we do keep it in because the nature of that discussion is different and the practitioner.
Speaker E Is there.
Speaker D Immediately say, what do you mean by sense? Just to get defined what they think. Common sense is in itself very highly.
Speaker F Remember, we're asking people to discard a phrase, and a lot of people will be quite reluctant to say, I don't use common sense.
Speaker G Let's move on. Richard, I think keep on our time. I need your wire. And while I'm getting it, maybe you could pass these around. I hope so.
Speaker F What I didn't have time to do was to look at the other two assessments. We use Psychometrics and 360 and show you some of the connections and why we use that package.
Speaker B Is that on the website?
Speaker F On the. Website. And I also have a PowerPoint with all the screenshots. If anyone is interested that you have that now or email it to you.
Speaker G I'm going to talk quickly here about global talent management. And what I'm dealing with here is a system that's been derived in work with clients over about six or seven years. And just to give you a sense of how that's happened, graham Construction and Engineering in Calgary, we started with their senior 50 or so managers about six years ago. And like so many of you have said, what are you going to do with all the data? And so we found FileMaker Pro as sort of the basic starting point, very robust cross platform database system that's easy for people like me who are sort of I can run the computer, but I'm not an It person can work with. And that's where we started. And the thing has been refined over the years with other clients. Soft Choice in Toronto, which is a software reseller, Tembec, which is Quebec multinational pulp and paper company, and Swiss Herbal Remedies, which is a Richmond Hill manufacturer and reseller of vitamins. And Thompson Gordon Group, which is a global specialty manufacturer. So you can see that it kind of fits across a series of different industrial applications. And the whole thing is addressed to the statement somebody made yesterday, that when you get the organization in place, then what you need to do is to get the human resource systems aligned to support what you're trying to do organizationally. And so inside the front cover of your book, there are the questions which this tries to answer for people in the organization. The CEO who says, I need to know where my business unit heads are coming from seven years from now. And the vice President who says, our young engineers are getting into middle management without the basic skills in people management. And the general manager who says, we need bosses and the boss's bosses to come to a meeting of the minds about what young managers and professionals need to develop fully. And it's tough where everybody is moving around the way they do. And the high flyer in the organization who says career visibility is important. I need to know that how I'm doing and what I want to do is on the screen of the powers that be. If not, I'll go somewhere else where I'm seen. And the VPHR who says, our tendency in appointments has been to grab the closest warm body and get on with it, to have managers consider a broader group, including people they don't know, they need a simple way of getting the information, which should include track record judgments on potential and developmental needs. And the COO who says, I've got accountability for nine direct reports and I've got manager once removed accountability for 47 others. I can't stay on top of this unless I've got all the information at my fingertips. When I need it, including salary and incentive options. So this is what this tool is designed to address. And because of our work with Tembec, which is a multinational company, a global company, we've got this web enabled so that it can operate from anywhere in the world. Or because people sometimes executives traveling sometimes like to do this on their laptop while they're flying, there are carry with you packages that you can do. So that's the overview of it. And inside exhibit one you'll see there is a sort of overall answer to the CEO's question where are my business unit heads coming from in seven years? The little chart there shows in total that this mythical company here has 46 people from in Stratum Four and up in 2005. And that with the existing Cadre that we've got in the place, we expect there'll be as many as 49 by 2017. And you can see where they're likely to be in the bands, in the strata. And so then we can go to the senior executive group. These are Stratum Six and up and you can look at specific people and where they're predicted to be where they are in 2005, the Stratum Six and then 2009, 2013, and the group that will be there in 2017. Now this presumes people don't retire and people don't move on. So it also presumes you're not bringing somebody in and of course can't keep track of that in this basic thing here, but you can start to see where the developmental problems are.
Speaker C Glenn, this particular graph, I've tried lots of different kinds of feedback and something equivalent to this is always the ones the managers come back and say that is the most useful piece of information I have.
Speaker G That feedback that's interesting. Yeah. Otherwise it's just lost anyway, this particular.
Speaker C Set of information, they come back and.
Speaker G Say, Boy, that has yeah. Then the bottom part of that chart is the Stratum Five contingent, which is the CEO's question here. Where are my business unit heads going to come from? So here's who they are. Here's who they are in cognitive capability potential. And of course a lot can happen here between an assessment of potential and the ability to actually take on a job. So I'm going to switch here to the software itself, which I've got set up. But the things we're going to look at are basically in your book. This is a mythical person by the name of Donald Vernon, who is a young director of Systems implementation. And we can see here that we're picking up all kinds of things, a lot of it right from the payroll systems or whatever, the basic HR systems that are running in the company. And then the next frame is horsepower, which is phrase the engineers like for cognitive capability, basically. And you can see here we're looking at a number of different opinions here the manager's estimate, the manager's once removed estimate, and the interview opinion in the case of where a consultant is used. And it's often the case that we're asked to kick start this process and managers and managers once removed don't have the ability to make these assessments. So you got to start somewhere and then proceed by successive approximations. So we might do an assessment interview and come up with an opinion here. And then we're trying to confirm that with mor and manager estimates and whatever processes we can get going in the organization that refine that and change it from time to time. A similar assessment overall on the current applied capability of the individual. And then whatever the chart, whatever the formal organization now says about the role that the person is in. There's a little routine here that allows you to calculate the potential value today because the assessment or the last reading in the file may be three years ago. And so this updates the current applied potential at today's date and also says where this person is likely to be in three years. And the idea here is you want to pick up people who are on the turn or potentially on the turn from one stratum to another so that you can make sure they've got what they need to make that turn. Now, we use methods here aimed at getting a fair bit of information on personal style. This is a little departure from Elliot's work where he focuses just on minus T. But we're saying we're interested to know about the sort of style nature of the individual. We're using the ades producer, administrator, entrepreneur and integrator. So this particular individual is a big P, big E. And then we're using the Enneagram personality system that gives us the sense of this is an individual in one of these nine styles. We're not wanting this to be used as an assessment technique to see about promotion, but more about feedback to the individual on development. And so the idea here is the more the individual knows about themselves, the better off they're likely to be in maximizing their potential. The file also picks up information on skilled knowledge and experience. And we want to get managerial judgments on managerial practices on a scale of one to five. And demonstrated effectiveness is the records from the assessment system, the performance assessment system, whatever the client organization is using. The example here is Jax friendly or Ro friendly, and then information on career history before the individual came to the organization and what's happened to the individual since. And remember what I said at the outset that what we're really trying to do here is make this as a tool available to the manager and the manager once removed as they're doing the jobs they need to do in developing the people. And think about the guy getting on the plane with his laptop under his arm friday night and he's heading back out to Vancouver. He's got a few hours here where he could sit with us and play with the people that he's responsible for. And the idea here is we really want to have all the information that managers and managers once removed need to have at the fingertips where they need it and when they need it. And out of our assessment interviews comes sort of an overall sense of the individual and what we see as developmental needs. And in the organizations we work with, we often run across the CEOs who say, well, I can see that person is bright and I understand what you're saying about style here and I think the track record indicates that maybe this person can't actualize that. And so what we're really asking is that the manager and the manager once removed come together on a judgment of where this person can go. This isn't as simple as taking the mode curves and saying, well, as in this case, the person will end up as a mature potential capability of Stratum Five. We want them to actually say, yeah, we think that that person can apply that actually down the road. So this is a managerial manager once removed judgment of what we think this person can do in this company. And then out of this flows a developmental set of developmental recommendations that are very specific. And in this particular case, this guy needs to improve his people skills and we want to get him off to the MIT People Management Program in the fall of 2005 and he needs an international assignment. So the mor is to watch for opportunity in 2005 and the target date here is before 2008. That should read and the person is interested in an executive MBA. And we either think or don't think that's a good idea. And so that should be something in the plan down the road here. And this is a thing that should be signed off by the manager and the manager once removed and then forms a part of the feedback back to the individual. And it depends on the nature of the organization, how this is done, the feedback. And our general approach here is that the idea is that everybody should have access to what's in their file. And we try to get companies to go along with that, so that anything that's here people can see. So people can see their file from anywhere in the world. We want the individual to take the initiative in their own development. So the last thing I want to show you here, which isn't actually in this particular version of the software that we're looking at, is the compensation module, which is at the last it, it's the last exhibit in the book. But the idea here is that there's a felt fair pay system and it's got three components. It's got salary, short term incentives and long term incentives. This particular individual is a Stratum Three is not eligible for long term incentive. But you can see the compensation record of the individual on screen and what the total direct compensation for the Stratum three in the organization is, what the salary bands are and what the STIP targets are, the short term incentive targets. And the idea here is that this is a part of the decision making process and this is something that the manager is using and giving feedback on performance and on reward. And once again, the idea is it's all together in the package so that managers can do their job as they're going on. Now, depending on the organization, there may be times when people get together, manager once removed groups, or whatever they might be, to look at talent pool in a block of the organization. And we do produce reports that fall right out of the software. This one on exhibit eight is a sort of a one pager that sums up this individual as the system sees them at a point in time. So you can get a sense of what might be in a book that a dozen managers once removed might sit down with and look at a cadre of maybe 50 or 100 people. So that's the thing. And I'm happy to take some questions. Yeah.
Speaker I George Daniel, seven.
Speaker G Yeah.
Speaker I Who develops the action plan? Is this whole process coordinated by a consultant?
Speaker G No, this should be coordinated by the HR department. Yeah.
Speaker I Okay, so who formulates these action plans? Because these are records of principles, the Mor has a lot of accountability, primary accountability for the assessment, the capability, the six session plan process, the equilibrations, the actual judgments of an individual CPC. So who would formulate this action plan?
Speaker G The action plan should be formulated jointly by the manager and the manager once removed. In our thinking here, and it's from the experience that managers, especially as you're implementing this kind of organization structure, get really jumpy when their boss has got some kind of direct channel to their subordinate. So what we've decided is the right way to do this is make the Mor and the manager in the same bubble as they deal with this kind of issue.
Speaker I Well, they have to be the same bubble because the manager, the immediate manager, is the coach of these individuals. So Timor is accountable for development. He'd like to see where his future CEO, wherever, is going. He also wants to know through the immediate manager why is affecting his role isn't there or whatever?
Speaker G Yes.
Speaker I Is he getting the coaching and all this other good stuff?
Speaker G That's right. So it's a joint requirement here and how they actually do that. In some companies, they just go down the hall and have a chat. Sometimes it's done in group meetings, but some cases this is where people are stretched across the globe. It's got to be done online in some way.
Speaker I Well, I know in our interior operations, I coordinate all the stuff from the floors all the way down through the once.
Speaker G Right.
Speaker I So I do all this stuff. That's why it's very labor intensive, but I like what you've developed here and perhaps we could chat offline at some point.
Speaker G Sure.
Speaker I Do you also have a demo of demo CD or something?
Speaker G Oh, sure, yeah, I can make you one. Yeah, I can.
Speaker F Anything else?
Speaker G The other question is when you're doing.
Speaker I Sort of assessments, typically the assessment of capabilities is done by the mor. You get some manager, you need management, but in a probation process you arrive at some type of current potential capabilities, we call it. So I see in your dissertation you have interview opinion.
Speaker D Who does that?
Speaker G That's where a consultant is brought in to do it. So many of the cases where we brought in, they're saying, well, we're trying to get more requisites, so to speak, but our managers and managers, once we move, don't know how to do this yet, so it needs to be kick started. So we want you to interview these 50 people and get us started.
Speaker I We got into that conversation about a month ago. We're not quite sure what they're doing judging, and I suggest that we bring in an external guy to do this. Mark for the bank wallet yesterday said no, we're going to learn to stop putting in front of the prerequisite. I expect the manager once removed and all my managers and staff to understand what the heck we're doing. It'll take a period of time, several iterations. This is the third time we'll have taken the carry operations through it and.
Speaker B There'S a better understanding.
Speaker I At the beginning everybody was with a lot of five and six capables and that was two years ago. And right now, once they understand what they're looking at and they took away the effectiveness role because this was a misunderstanding around what effectiveness role is versus current benchmark capability. Once you got an understanding, the pendulum kind of swung back to where the judgments have dropped in some cases by strap and a half or wherever it was. So people do get a better understanding.
Speaker H Yeah.
Speaker G And our objective is always to train the organization up so they've got the confidence, but our experiences, they can't start competence somehow you've got to go successive approximations to make it happen. Judy, did I see your hand?
Speaker A I was just saying.
Speaker G Anything else or were we ready for a coffee break? Because when we come back, Lois Melbourne is going to talk to us about charting.
Speaker E Well, thank you for coming to spend some time with us. Acquire is actually an eleven year old company, but you may have heard of us, hopefully as Timevision. We changed our name in May Timevision and now Acquire were the very original creators of the automatic chart. The original purpose for our company was let's take data from an existing system, an existing HRIS system usually, and create an organization chart from that. And that has served us very well. We now have around 1900 customers and we have customers using our product in 123 countries. To be perfectly honest, when I started the company, I don't think I knew there were 123 countries. So over the eleven years I have learned a great deal. My husband and I are the founders, we're the co founders of the company. Ross Melbourne, he's the technologist and I'm the more customer facing entity of the group. There's about 50 of us now based out of Texas and we have employees predominantly in the US. But also in the UK and Germany. We are privately held, we are a woman owned business. We currently have 6 million employees under management. When you look at all of our customer base and we're adding between 100,400 thousand new employees as our customers expand or we acquire new customers each and every month. So it's a rapidly growing space to be in. And part of what I want to address today, partly because a lot of people in the room said we really want to see how does this technology, how can we do this with technology, how do we keep this from being manual? A big part of what I'm going to show you, it may vary a little bit from what you're doing in a day to day. There's a lot of it that will be very applicable to what you may be helping your customers with. But sustainability is what's required to get any company to purchase technology. What is it going to do long term for the organization? It is typically a capital expense. So part of what I will show you will be how other customers are using our product. It might be slightly different than the scope of what you would use it in a day to day. But when you want a customer to pay for something, you got to show them the other ways it's being used. Also there may be things that I have missed in the requisite understanding that I am learning more and more about, especially in the last few days that I maybe don't have a sample for. But as you look at other examples of what we have done, we can translate it to help you in your day to day and what you're helping your customers with. So sustainability is very important. Also with 1900 customers around the world, we may already be in your customer site and so you might be able to use our tools that are already in a company and use them for your specific purposes. So remember, as I go through a lot of this, we're driving most of this from data. We are trying to automate this as much as possible. So this is often a system, our products being named.org publisher and builder. We're driving information from existing data whenever possible. The basic chart, this is what we live with in a lot of different entities. It's usually company name and then you've got job titles and people and we're really trying to help companies do more than just get a generic.org chart on a page. A little background of why the heck would you change your company name after eleven years is applicable to the presentation. It was hard to do. Ross and I got over it really fast. We're like, yeah, let's do it. The rest of the company was in a little bit of shock when we said we're going to go through this process, we're going to change it. But part of it is because we wanted to be known as more than just the charting company because we had truly grown in our functionality and in our services of what we provide our customers. We are a software company. We provide services only on the technical perspective of getting an organization up and running and reaching their requirements. So there's a great deal of synergy for us and other consulting agencies because there is no competition there with us and agents that are working within a company. But we wanted to really reflect what we are doing now, which is unified workforce intelligence. And part of that is let's look at all of the data that's spread out throughout the entire organization that's about the workforce. It's not just data that's in a human resource system. It's not just in a knowledge management system. It's also in identity management for who has login rights to what? What were the performance reviews, what is the payroll? So what we have expanded to is unifying data from all of the various different systems and bringing them into the organizational structural view so that good decisions and informed decisions can be made. So the overview of this presentation is kind of the places you've never seen an.org chart, but probably should have. Almost everything that I will show you is replicated from a customer site. There's a few things that are new, let me show you this. But almost all of this is because we have done this within a customer base. And my occupational warning is don't do this in a PowerPoint. As you were saying, I don't want to do this manually anymore. And the bigger the company, the less productive it is. Trying to build charts manually is painful, it's inaccurate, and it's definitely not sustainable. So that's why we bring technology. Now this brings me to my first sample, which is a new one for me, and that is trying to represent how we can represent an Ro organization. So the challenge I have been faced by several of you that have talked to me is about we need the stripes, we need the lines across to be able to show the stratums. I can't do that yet. However, I always lay my cards on the table. I'll tell you exactly where we stand. What I can do is present the levels. And in this example, what I'm doing is showing you by color stripes, if you will. So if I can't do the lines across the back, the blue can represent a stratum driving from data. So if you have data in some of these system that are going through this process for you, we can take that data and we can graphically represent it. And as that data changes, the graphics change. So if someone moves or as people come in and out of the organization, once you've set up that a particular stratum is going to be brown, then anytime you feed that data in there, it's there. You are not having to use a drawing tool.
Speaker F Yes, I got a couple questions about box.
Speaker C Yes, you have the ability to get that box at a specific place, vertically on the screen, rather than in relation to each other, so that I can say I want straight on the tree to correspond to those lines. I want those set of lines, I want those charts to be able to line up those lines.
Speaker E To a certain extent. To a certain extent? Yes, to a certain extent. Now, to have the complete flexibility that you're asking for, you need a drawing tool simply because as data changes, if you have a large organization, you're forcing as you look on a page, it gets very difficult to adapt, if you will. Here is the same organization chart in the browser. Okay, so I can look at this organization, I can increase the amount of space so that I can say I need larger gaps.
Speaker C But at the present time, you can't position, you can't choose the position. Your program will help calculate the layout.
Speaker E It will calculate the layout. You can create levels so that there is further space between them. But if you're asking, can I take this? And then grab that controller and drag him up or down, and the line.
Speaker B Will automatically move depending how you drag and drop.
Speaker E You can do that as you're getting ready to print, but not be able to necessarily control that online and have that as the data updates and drives it, because you're looking for two different things if you're driving from data. One is, let's keep this data coming in, but then I need to manually make a process. So to print, yes, you can make some adjustments and scoop people around onto the page, but then once you've printed it, you would need to make that adjustment again.
Speaker B Do you understand why we're asking that question?
Speaker E Yes, I do, but the challenge lies in driving something from data and then having the complete flexibility there. But yes, I do understand.
Speaker B What about the ability to put a set of horizontal into the class?
Speaker E And that's what I said from the very beginning. That's the one thing I cannot do at this point. And so that's why I tried to do the best I could, was be able to give you a color representation. And so the clients that we've talked to about it, especially those that are not completely indoctrinated into the entire process. The stripe is not as important to that end of the clientele. And we're trying to figure out how big is the market that, frankly, really does care about the lines. And that's feedback I need. And that's feedback I'm learning in this session is just how marketable is, that.
Speaker I It'S probably less care than do care. Even in April, Foster, Manitoba doesn't use lines because it feels symbolism, discriminatory and all this other good stuff.
Speaker E Whereas in the interior operations so we're evaluating how can we help, of course, commercially, the most clients. But how could we do it so that we can maybe get you closer and maybe get there for when you do need it? That's part of our learning process. And feedback is incredibly important to us.
Speaker B I continue to have to manually draw stuff because I've been manually drawing for years in Page Maker.
Speaker E Yeah.
Speaker B But I got some drag and drops that I've already created. So it's not that difficult.
Speaker E Okay.
Speaker A And it's not data driven.
Speaker C Well, it would be nice if it.
Speaker F Were data driven.
Speaker E Right?
Speaker B So if you put a high three or a low three and plot it. But there are times I'll put something right on the line.
Speaker E And what I'd like to talk to you about is when are those exceptions? Because as we dive into this further, what would drive those exceptions and would data ever drive those exceptions? That's the type of thing I'd like to take offline and to dive in and to get your information from, because that's valuable to us to be able to develop the product for you.
Speaker B For these guys, it depends upon how you're looking at it. In our models, we have a set of tools online, but we use six factors to determine the level of work. And just depending on the congruency of the six factors will make a judgment sometimes of, well, this one's a little off or higher. And before we make a full determination of where we plot the box, where it would plot six factors as the data inputs.
Speaker E Okay?
Speaker C And then we'd like to plot two different kinds of boxes in circle. One that represents people capability and one.
Speaker B That represents now, I go beyond that. I got that problem, but I'm showing them where the box is, where the box should.
Speaker E And what a lot of our customers have done is they've worked with different styles of boxes, can represent that. We have the ability to take archival charts, and you can use archival charts for either the traditional archive so I can see what it is last year, but also to be able to see this is where we were and this is where we want to be, kind of thing and do comparisons and get exception reports. What's the difference between where these people are at and where we think they will be going? Now, here inside of the product, I have my color. Coding. And one of the things that you can do is you can isolate. I want to see everybody that is a particular stratum, where do they report in the organization? Now, this is a very tiny chart, but if you picture hundreds, thousands of people being able to say, I want to see all of the people that fit a particular stratum, you could do that. Or all of the people that are at a particular level, you could do that and see where do they fit in the hierarchy. And the hierarchy being where's the command chain that they report through. So you would be able to visualize this. And it's a quick query. And if you do the quick query and you don't have to be a technician to build our queries, they're really easy. And I'll show you some of those in a moment. You could make these so that they're standard and they truly are, as in my case, they're what we call a group. These people fit into a certain type of group. So I can select and see only a certain type of group. Or I could change that so that group included a couple of different criteria, the high performers that are at a particular level, that type of thing. A few of these things will deviate, like I said, from what your exact focus is on your everyday executions. But they are the things that help the product get into an organization. One of them is checking that data integrity. And let me talk a couple of things. In some cases, this could be, in your case, the data integrity of the other systems. As you showed, you could see graphically, if you could drill down and see, well, who are these people? If you plot these people into the organization and you are doing color coding within whatever requirements you want to look at, you can see very quickly and your customers can see very quickly. That guy doesn't really report to him. Now, to give you an example of data integrity, in a typical world that I work in, 23,000 person company implemented.org publisher, and the first thing that they found was 435 people that the data said didn't report to anyone. Isn't that fun? They had five people that reported to themselves, good job if you can get it. And then they had 25 people that reported in circles. So you approve my expense reports, I'll approve your expense reports, and we both wind up with big screen TV. This really drives the Sarbanes Oxley auditors through the roof. This is a control deficiency that will be flagged for a public company. If you do not have rigor against who, reports to who, and cannot show that you know who reports to who, and that that data is clean, the auditors will go ballistic on you. The auditor's very first move in a Sarbanes Oxley audit in the States. Well, Sarbanes is going to be in the States predominantly. But the very first thing that all of the major auditing firms have created is a role based audit. So the first thing they do is give me your payroll list, give me your corporate.org chart, let me compare them, because everybody on payroll had darn well better be in the chart and have a good reason for them to be there. And they do a role audit and they want to see who is in what role in the organization. The 23,000 person company was not an anomaly. I mean, regularly we have 10,000 person company with 1500 people that don't report to anybody. Sometimes it's just fat fingers on the keyboard that create that issue. Other times it could be more malicious than that. Quite often, a lot of times it is problems with how people are tracking their data within human resources, which you folks have probably encountered many, many times. If you have a reporting relationship, that's a person to person reporting relationship in your HR data and the boss leaves, well, the person left. So your reporting structure is now broken. And as you probably often do from what I'm hearing, is you've got to be role based. You have to be looking at this from a role based perspective. Well, if you walk into a client and their PeopleSoft system, let's say, is tracking people on a people to people relationship, they got to make the change. They've got to move that data to a role based or position to position reporting. And we help companies do that. And because we can bring the data into our system, we've built the hierarchy and then we can find the Anomalies, get it fixed, then get that data role based and push it back into PeopleSoft or SAP or Oracle or whatever type of HRIS system they're working with. So we help companies with that. It's also been very valuable for companies to prepare their data as they've gone live for a new PeopleSoft implementation or new Tesseract implementation. JD. Edwards, what's the data going to look like if we've moved from this version to that version and we're making all these changes or we're changing HR systems? Visibility is very, very key.
Speaker B The platform set up to be with a lot of the HRIS major providers.
Speaker E Yes, and we are frankly agnostic. We work with everybody. I mean, we have, pardon data, is data, and we have worked very diligently to have connectors with a great deal of the HRIS systems and we partner with many of them so that we can keep that rolling.
Speaker B Have you become the de facto standard?
Speaker E We are, we are partners with we have about 350 SAP customers. We have between 80 and 90 PeopleSoft customers. We have about 65 to 70 Oracle customers. And then the rest are all over the spectrum from Excel spreadsheets to JD. Edwards. Tesseract, Genesis, one of the things that I think ties closely to what you folks do, and I'm going to have to adapt some of my presentations. I get to adapt some of my presentations now that I have been presenting about roles, because now I'm learning even more and more about, from your perspective, roles and how they relate, but from the corporate governance, it's segregation of duties. Should you be doing multiple things? This is an example where a company wanted to roll out what teams do people belong to? And in those teams, the numbers are which teams? And so one might be in the information technology group, it might be creating the electronic funds transfer connectivity between the various systems. Segregation of duties needs to be represented, for example, because the programmer should not also be the database administrator to a particular system. And so making data available is very valuable because they need to make sure that there's not an overlapping roles. So this kind of thing may also be able to represent some of the other items that you are tracking that are critical to being able to show a graphic for who is in which type of role, what types of tasks do they have. For example, we really specialize in, and this is a big driving force for our entire company, is uncovering buried data and making it understandable, putting things into context that are very difficult in database sheets and Excel spreadsheets. This is a chart that has been very interesting for us, a corporation that's a financial services I'm sorry, a professional services provider. So their people are on billable hours, and they had an incredible amount of hours that were not being billed. Manager didn't get things signed off on, there was a hiccup, client didn't sign off on things. And they were going into what this company calls PR Suspense, or Payroll Suspense, otherwise known as the PR Black Hole, because things that had not been billed would just get pushed back and pushed back. So what we did is we helped this company bring their PR Suspense data into the organization chart. All of a sudden, it became very evident who the biggest offenders were within the organization about not getting all of their hours billed. And so it gave them a very, very clear picture. But what they also did is they tied links to it so that when someone can see those red numbers and they can see, this is the amount in my area that's unbilled, they can click on that. And it launched them through the chart into the system that could allow them to get it cleaned up. This company has found $4 million that they have not invoiced for in last year's billable dollars. And boy, I wish I'd made a deal to cut a commission on that one, because the entire implementation for them, that was dozens of business rules touching multiple different types of departments requirements was one of our larger deals, and it was a quarter of a million dollars. And this was one place where they are saving money. Another place where they're saving money is people that were being paid too long. Being paid too long after they had been terminated.
Speaker B Different from pay too much. Paid too much.
Speaker E Well, we could help you that put the payroll in there. And we have seen people I haven't seen it implemented. I've had seen people talking about trying to put benchmarking dollars into roles compared to existing salaries for those people so that they could see where the gap was. I'd love to see that implemented, but I don't know anybody that has good enough benchmarking data to do a really solid data analysis on there. But boy, that would be awesome. But uncovering terminations in systems. This company had a couple of different issues. They had people that were terminated and they were still active in either the HR system or they were still active in the payroll system. And they spent half a million dollars last year paying 400 people too long. And it's paperwork quite often. Oh, that was an ugly firing. The exit interview went terrible. I'll do that paperwork next week, and then it gets buried and then it doesn't get terminated. And there's always got to be those signatures. Can we go work for them and get fired by them? Work for them for a little while. So what we have done is we've created a perspective where they can view the organization chart and managers can see if you've been terminated in HR, but not in payroll or not in the corporate network, then you will still be visible on the organization chart. So until you disappear off the chart, you are somehow still connected to the organization, and it makes things visible for the organization to make sure that they're getting everything done. Very interesting quote from Giga trends is that 30% of people have login rights available into a corporation within 30 days after they've left the company. So that gets a little scary. So we are helping companies do analysis of who has login rights to where. I want to be able to see the representation in the organization chart. An example would be in this one would be I have rights to create a PO, and I also have a right to work on the inventory system. Well, I should never be able to have access rights or login rights to be able to manipulate both because that means I can generate a PO and then go hide it because I can go manipulate my inventory. Auditors don't like that either because there's potential for fraud. Asset tracking. I clicked through that one pretty fast. But here is an example of an organization chart where people are marrying their organization chart to their asset data, who has access to which systems? And that can be very critical as people are coming and going or moving, or they're updating their technology. And how can I see who has what types of systems? I have live demos of these too, but I wanted to make sure I could get through slides and explain these. Another place that you might not see charts all the time is online because companies so often just go with the paper version. But most important is quite often the elimination of reports that are requested into HR. So what we're trying to say is you need to have the managers have their charts online instead of asking HR for yet another report. This is very important to both HR and It that doesn't show up particularly well. I'm sorry. This is a slide that has headcount and let me go into a live example of a better one here. Sunny Glaze doesn't give a whole lot better view there, but that's a headcount report in. The number one request set of requests for reports into human resources involves some kinds of headcount. I need everybody that's X, I need to know how many people speak German, I need to know how many people are expatriates and they're asking quite often for just a number or sometimes a number in a list. So what we're trying to do is help people get that information at their fingertips so that they stop asking for it all the time within the organization. And there I can drill down through the organization and I can see different parts of my organization and I can see the headcount or I can show let's see, let's change that. To be able to see all levels in my organization. It spreads all out. So if I change the number of levels, then I'm looking at a different perspective and it can go more compact on the screen. A very important thing as we spend so much time developing people is we want to see an.org chart at the click of the employee's mouse looking for internal job opportunities and not going to Monster.com to look for their next career path. That is important to a lot of companies. If you are a company that has unions in place, there may be requirements that a job is posted internally before it goes external. It's one example, a lot of government entities have that. So what we do is allow the ability to easily represent where the open positions. You can hot link from that organization chart off to what is the job requisition to go create another job, or what is the ability to see how do I apply for this job? It could link to your external posting. If you've got a hire.com system in place and you want to launch off to that, we can hook into either other documents or other systems directly from the chart. So the chart kind of becomes a roadmap. We have an incredible success at helping reduce work for it as well. And one of the places that we find generates the most corporate email that goes corporate wide is the benefits department. So that's why I use this as an example we have a very easy to use search mechanism. So what I did is, instead of necessarily going through the whole process because I didn't know how much time I would have, it's very easy to use and I can show it. We have the ability for you to be able to make a search in the organization and say, I need everybody that's on benefit plan A, because there's now a change to benefit plan A, and I get that whole list. And then on a click of a button, I can say, please create an email list out of this group. Now if any of you have ever had to go to it and say, okay, I need everybody that fits this requirement, and I need to be able to send emails to them quarterly, it grimaces because they have to create and maintain a list within the email system. And it's very, very difficult to do, and it's quite often incredibly manual. So instead what you can do is give that ability straight from the organization chart. And so the administrator of benefits can say, give me everybody benefits plan A. They create an email to those people, they launch that out, they don't have to send me. To whom it may concern, if you are on benefits plan A, then pay attention. Otherwise press Delete now, which we find that happens in a lot of different companies. You can set restrictions so that you can say, okay, we don't want people creating more than 20 people in an email list. If a company wants to say, one email list should never be more than 50 employees or 100 employees or something like that to control, my Chevy is for sale, see it in the parking lot kind of emails, maybe not, but you can do ad hoc email lists. It's incredibly easy and very popular. All of you being in organizational design, you probably have a very good feeling that people want to know, where do I fit? One of the things that we hear repeatedly from customers is their or chart is the top accessed place on their corporate intranet. It's very interesting in some cases, especially the load balancing that we test for people is, okay, how many people are going to check it on the first day? Remember getting your yearbook? The very first thing you did was to see how did your pictures look? Very first thing people do is, am I in this organization chart and do I fit right? And the first time you hope your box isn't pink and that you're still there. This is an example of an organization chart, has pictures in it. Very common implementation, includes phone numbers. It becomes a corporate directory. Can sometimes eliminate multiple systems inside of an organization because you don't have to maintain a phone book and then an email list book and then a corporate.org chart. So a couple of places that you do expect organization charts is succession planning. This is a representation of very specific data that comes from a succession planning tool. And we hook up to several of those, those that are in the main HRIS systems as well as freestanding. But looking at what is the rank, what year will they be ready? We can have who is the primary, who's the incumbent, who's in there now, and who are the top three candidates. Let's say that's a very common implementation people do, or they sometimes flip it the other way and say here is a person in one of the top three jobs that they might want to go into. So we've seen people do things from both perspectives, EEOC or diversity tracking, because we can roll up numbers very easily. It's a very common place for people to start getting the numbers for their diversity reports and also be able to color code if you're ever trying to make a point. Those of you that have had to walk into a room and say, we don't have any level fours in this department. Well, sometimes that might be hard to show unless you graphically prove it. And we have found that as well. With diversity, we've often had people color code their diversity charts so that they can make that point directly out graphically to the organization. I buz through a lot of particular examples. I do have things live, but I think that I've run out of time here.
Speaker G I think it's a good stopping point. I just might say that the data in our talent management we've used to drive acquire charting for a this is compatible there, and I'd be interested in Dwight's experience at Capel on using it in an Ro design environment.
Speaker H We've been using the software since 1999, and what we were looking for at that point was a tool where you could get the information which comes out of our analytics, which we use SPSS to drive. And the real strength of this software that we liked about it is that from SPSS you can generate the Excel spreadsheet with whatever particular pieces of data that you wanted. And this has the flexibility then to be able to bring it in. So if time span, for instance, is the important dimension, and you wanted to show a gap situation by a different color box, a different size box, or, as I learned yesterday, a gap between the boxes, it's quite easy to be able to drive that, because then, as the software is updated, we make changes in the review process. Once the template is there, the charts are always generated from the client perspective. We find it very useful and probably in the same way you use it. There's nothing like each manager having a page where they can see their box and the boxes of their direct reports. So to be able to generate those in a seamless way without a whole bunch of effort was a real strength, and that's the publishing capabilities of a board publisher, I think. There it is, right in the name. It's a real strength to either throw it into HTML so you can give a customer a CD or PDF or hard version give off to them. The other thing that we've taken to doing over the last few years as well is actually recommending to clients that they would use this software to maintain their workforce control system as they're going forward. Because once there's an implementation, the executive has spent a whole bunch of time and money in getting their organization lined up right. So they really do need a control tool to be able to make sure that there aren't changes being made that they don't agree with. So having a tool like this means that someone is in control of the basic database from which the charts are driven. If that box doesn't exist, then you're not hiring that person. So what is the process to go through to get a box on the chart and then engage HR in the hiring process. And then clients are pretty clever about this because it is so flexible. They use all different kinds of things. A hot link, say, to a role description or to other environments that other pieces that are useful. The last point I wanted to make that we find quite useful is the roll up function. So within each box you can roll up specified data from boxes below it. So if you want to get headcount below that manager, payroll below that manager, any of the other dimensions that you can imagine can be captured and rolled up in that way.
Speaker G That's great.
Speaker E A chart.
Speaker F Yeah.
Speaker E Let's see, which one did I have.
Speaker C You heard the question we asked in the beginning? Sounds like you're saying yes, you can.
Speaker H You can force it because there is a field which we were discussing yesterday, where you can say how any levels of boxes down from the top of the organization should any given box beam. So you could assign numbers to one.
Speaker I Low.
Speaker C 25 line exactly. And then you go third stratum or something like that and you can position them in that cell, then you can.
Speaker H Between the cells within that cell. The issue is, because it is generated automatically from the data, then each chart at each manager level will be different in terms of how it looks, depending.
Speaker C On how many employees can you force it to the number of layers.
Speaker D So.
Speaker C You may not fill all those layers.
Speaker H Yeah, if you had someone in a manufacturing situation while direct reports the box gets so small that it would be hard to read.
Speaker E Or you could be tracking it by if you were looking at, in a manufacturing environment, you might be tracking in some perspectives the position and not the individual. So that you're not when you're looking at it pictorially and you're trying to see it on a view, then you could see where does a particular position lie? But if you're looking at each and every individual yes. If you've got 100 people in a.
Speaker C Role can you look at positions and individuals at the same time, different shape boxes? Probably can.
Speaker E You could. I need to understand what your requirement was so I could help you figure out the fit to roll.
Speaker A Okay.
Speaker C Different verdict.
Speaker E Yeah. I mean, that could be done, and it could also be we could certainly put in two different boxes on the page in that scenario. Big organizations, it will start looking very cluttered. But I understand as you drill down and you're focusing yeah.
Speaker B You take departments or you take an executive team, and literally just the top five, top ten officers as an example. You plot against that, both role as is, should be, and potentially have people fit against that.
Speaker H If you wanted three different sets of charts, that's absolutely possible because you can get different bits of data or different views or charts with different views based on different pieces of the data that you're pulling up to get it all on the same pages when it gets complicated, because then you have to represent. You'd have to force it in some way. Not sure how that would be about.
Speaker B The ability to show gaps where you literally have a messing your experience and you really can stretch that line enough to be able to have a full work level that's just empty.
Speaker H What we tend to do is use a different color box whether if it's in a gap situation or in a compression situation. So in an.org chart where it might be quite full, if you have a lot of direct reports then you can see immediately the roles which should be reporting somewhere else or might be compressed.
Speaker E I believe I can show that better than I've done here but it's because I've learned more in the last two days than I had about what elements are the most important for you to track. So I'm going to play with that.
Speaker B One of the key flags is the.
Speaker E Gaps in general absolutely.
Speaker C And the size of them. So it's the visual impact of it, the size of them doesn't presentation? Yeah, being able to show this much versus this much and that's an important part of the presentation. The color thing shows it but they don't get the visual responses.
Speaker E And I'm going to work more on examples because as Dwight and I talked about what his requirements were, I believe we can help there but I can't do the origami myself to make sure that I represent it well. So I would more than happy. I want to make sure that I get your name so that as I get samples that can represent it, I can say does this work and get the feedback. Can you replicate ideal way to do it? Ideal absolutely. Now I've also learned that matrix reporting is lightning might hit me in this room as I talk about people who report to two people's bosses, but because that's out there. Yeah, because you get to clean them up. So let me show you what the organization looks like before you get to clean them up. This is a functionality that I need to explore because functionality was designed for matrix reporting. But there may be some ways that you folks can utilize this as well. When we talk about where someone is versus where they should be, I got to learn more about this and play with so yes, the Kai Wang here has an icon in her box that is because she has this direct report and when I click on it, I can see that she has another report in the organization. So I can move to that other place in the organization and I can see her as that it's that dotted line relationship. Well, because this is there, it's just a matter of representing that there's two places that this person is represented in the data. So what I'm thinking is we could use possibly the same functionality to say this person is here, should be there and be able to do a jump or to be able to see them visually. So I need to play with that, especially with someone here and kind of maybe do some representation to say are all of the different ways that we use matrix possibly a way where there could be a representation in that kind of tie? Yes.
Speaker C Question. The Ro Buck will understand this. Does the capability for showing tir.
Speaker E Is.
Speaker C That what she's just described to.
Speaker D That.
Speaker H Same question occurred to me over the last couple of days as we've been talking about it because we haven't used it that way. But for the client to be able to show those very powerful.
Speaker D Yeah, that's.
Speaker H Exactly where my mind went as well. I think we'd like to explore that.
Speaker E I need someone to give me a tutorial on.
Speaker G Cleans up the matrix.
Speaker I Okay, people, away from that confusion about authority.
Speaker C So we like your software even though we don't like Matrix because it shows.
Speaker E Another thing we need well, and it shows a reason that needs to be cleaned up. Yeah. So I am here to learn as much as to also because this helps me and I can maybe get some examples there. So, Dwight, maybe, or any of you, I'll tackle a little bit more of, what does that look like and what do you want it to look like? And I'll develop some samples for that. And maybe that goes partly into the white paper that Ken wants us to present on how to represent things, so that it could be an example of how that could actually be represented.
Speaker G That'd be good. Yeah.
Speaker E As we get these different things into place.
Speaker G So we've got a few minutes left here. There was some suggestion we might want to come back to Judy and Richard on questions too. So let me just throw it open to the whole morning. I've got one question, Richard, about do.
Speaker D You have any evidence about whether the.
Speaker H Test is gender or neutral?
Speaker F Yes. In some ways we're very fortunate because one of our major activities centers is South Africa, and the South African Test and Standards Commission is notorious for being question.
Speaker I Getting back to Richard's, presentation editor Jack's written a number of books, and one of the books is Rich Human Capability. He's done a number of studies ago. I think he wrote the book with his wife. Two studies involved in redis and the Power and Light.
Speaker D Somewhere up in Pennsylvania.
Speaker I We interviewed the Mor, the media manager, and the Sor came up with a nine two correlation with respect to its current potential capability. I guess what the consulting world was trying to do is trying to make it easy for the managers or business in general to try to determine the CPC. So we now have several methods here.
Speaker D Glenn, who does a structure of interview.
Speaker I And puts an individual through, I don't know, an hour, an hour and a half interview process, takes a lot of.
Speaker D Notes, tapes the individuals and listens for.
Speaker I The language to see what is it?
Speaker F Is it conceptual?
Speaker I Is it stranded through serial processing? Four parallel whatever, and then makes the determinations, I would imagine, with some peers. And you have Rick Richards, who's an online type of thing, and then there's some interview process. Now, Richard, have you ever validated because you devised a method doing it? Typically in science, we have an experiment. We come up with results and validate how accurate is it?
Speaker B Have you done that? Have you compared it to, say, Glenn's.
Speaker I Method and then to.
Speaker F We haven't done competitive validation. But remember, what you're seeing, what I showed you is part of a family. So we're starting with a CPA, which is the full on two to three hour interview. It's also not new. And going for what, 20 OD years, tens of thousands of assessments. The entire process was independently validated at the Army Research Institute, Washington, that's bellingra. So it's been independently validated at a national R D level. And the MCPA is a computerized variant of that. It's actually described as a labor saving that. And then there is a third assessment called Iris, which is closer to, I believe, your approach, which is a structured interview, which is used for graduate entrants and people working at lower levels, which does not require people to, as it were, attack the phrases to make choices about phrases. We don't have to have the facility to understand those phrases. We make choices between the phrases. Just a straight interview, that's about 35 to 45 minutes interview. So there are three ways of approaching assessment of capability, each from a very clearly structured and rigorous and validated basis.
Speaker H Mr. Kasaris, as I read the question, the issue is maybe it's wrong for the MROs to use this at all themselves. It really should be something they do.
Speaker D With the folks say, well, I'm going.
Speaker H To get an outside person to do this for me.
Speaker A Which is why it's not done in isolation of any involvement of the line manager. We'd be in absolute agreement. Accountability for development of people sits with the line manager.
Speaker I Richard, you also have personality assessments.
Speaker G That's correct, yes, I did part of this about three or four years ago.
Speaker I Online and then got bogged down on.
Speaker E It and connections improved.
Speaker F That's why your name is familiar.
Speaker E And then other things happened.
Speaker F This journey for me all started National Defense University when they were looking for a really effective method of assessing people. And it took three major strands. One was Capability, which led to the development of the MCPA because they simply could not sustain the time and the cost of doing CPA for 130 people coming in the time trip. The second one was performance. So they developed the 360, which is called the SLDI Strategic Leader Development. We have a civilianized version of that we call the EDA. CCL in Greece will of course use that. And then to help people make sense of everything that arise arose from that, they took a psychometric site. Initially in the pilot program, they used a psychometric instrument that I bought, Party, which is an expert system which looks at personality, but references personality to key functional areas, teamwork work styles, conflict handling. And that package then gave people the wherewithal to sit down and work out where they stood, where they wanted to get to, how they were going to get there. And all the developments are in particular, they found that applying the 360, which is a very powerful 360, which unusually includes derailleurs or inhibitors, was causing quite a lot of upset because people couldn't make sense of why. It was, for example, that they scored very badly on things like temper and arrogance, micromanagement. And applying a very sophisticated psychometrics helped them to understand that. And of course, the other thing that was the relative levels of capability also conditioned reports and superiors assessments and that came up very strongly. And we find that comes up time and time again. So you'll find typically the caricature is when you have a senior manager who's at a much lower level of capability than the people working for him or her, and they will set up defense mechanisms by scoring people down, causing a lot of upset. So that's kind of the ideal package. But each of these can be applied individually. And the other thing is, because these are very sophisticated computer driven packages, for example, with the psychometrics, you can add capability into the psychometrics, you can factor analyze that instantaneously. And that can be very interesting in organizations that are using the whole package. See if there are psychometric connections to, for example, their higher potential people.
Speaker G I think we're at the end of our time.
Speaker D Let me.
Speaker G Just say thank you to Judy and Richard and Lois for coming and sharing with us today.