Training For Software And Hardware Engineering

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Scenario

You along with some friends have recently started an IT consultancy firm (imagine a name for example IT Vision). You are asked to develop an organizational informative and strategic booklet. In order to prepare the booklet, you are asked to do the following tasks.

Task 1

Give a short introduction of the organization; develop a mission statement, its aim and five specific objectives. 2.1

Introduction

Our company InfoCare is an IT (Information Technology) company which was founded in 1998. This company works in the IT field for training, maintaining and production IT programs and software. We have been producing many new software that are taking good places in the market; we not only produce good products but also produce good software designer, here we train people interested in software and hardware field and also provide them a 100% guaranteed job placements with good income. The main services of our company are as follows:

Training for Software and Hardware engineering.

Hardware Maintenance

Software Production

Security Services

Mission Statement

InfoCare is a place of complete solution for IT materials; we have solution here for each and every sector, might it either be big ones or small ones. We want our company to be one of the best IT Company in the world delivering our services with the best customer experience in the market we serve (Entrepreneur, 2003).

Aim

We are looking forward in the future to occupy the entire market of Nepal in IT field; we are developing various kind of Database Management System for different types of offices, security system for household and offices and maintenance of difficult to difficult mechanism we can. Our company will be producing high skilled manpower and also will be hiring them in various branches are planning to open soon (Tutor2u.net, 2012).

Objective

Open at least five branches within a year in main commercial districts of Nepal. In this way commercial offices will be helped by us to computerize the information available to avoid the loss of data.

Establish a showroom in the Kathmandu Valley to test our security services in the household and office area before expanding it into other part of Nepal.

Produce more high skilled manpower and most possibly enroll them in our company itself for the growth of the company.

Achieve the sales turnover double the previous year.

Win this year’s Best IT Company title.

(Referenced from: Businesscasestudies, 2007)

Task 2

As a member of the organization, your major role is to develop an appraisal system for it. First, briefly describe different types of appraisal systems and recommend on that you think best suit for the development of the organization. Explain how it may work best? (3.1, 3.2)

The effort of employees can determine the success and survival of an organization and appraisal is potentially one way in which those efforts can be aligned with the aim of an organization, employees can be motivated and their performance managed. Performance appraisal is one of the most important human resource (HR) practices and one of the most heavily researched topic in employee psychology, a subject of research over 70 years.

Since 70 years of long time we have been practicing various types of performance appraisals in different organization; the various types of appraisal are as follows:

Behavior Focused Performance Appraisal

The behaviorally anchored rating system (BARS) judges your employees actions using a rating scale to measure specific behaviors; four rating scales are used in behavior-focused evaluations: graphic rating scales, behaviorally anchored rating scales, forced choice scales and mixed standards scales (Small Business – Chron, 1999). Behaviorally performance appraisal is a very worthy way to check whether the employee is good in public relation or not, is s/he good in commanding and undertaking command of his/her senior and are customers satisfied with the services provided by the employee to them.

Unstructured Performance Appraisal

In this method of performance appraisal the evaluator conducts a small essay test on any topic according to which the evaluator grades the employee. This is one of the most common appraisal used in many organization and also when enrolling employee to a new job (Administrator, n.d.).

Trait Performance Appraisal

Traits identify the physical or psychological characteristics of a person (O’Donell, Boyce and et.al). According to the characteristics of a person evaluator is to judge him/her; this type of appraisal is quite effective, here we can find whether the person is hard working, lazy, smart, active, wise or dull.

Self-appraisal

Self-appraisal is one of the most important part of performance appraisal; here the employee gives the opinion or his/her views and points regarding the performance. This is conducted with the help of a self-appraisal form where the employee rates him/her on various bounds, training needs, job achievement, strength, weakness, problem faced and so on (Appraisals.naukrihub.com, n.d).

Reward management appraisal

Reward management appraisal is a major set of human resource activities; it serves the strategic purposes of attracting, motivating and retaining employees. Money reward price should be provided to employee according to their hard work as well as in relation to job behavior, in this way employees can increase the level of motivation within the circle of employees (Cornwell, 2007).

Management By Objective (MBO)

MBO was introduced by Peter Drucker. MBO suggest that a business should define objectives or targets for an individual to achieve and revise these targets after accessing the performance of the workers. MBO is a set of formal procedure that establishes and revises and progresses towards common gals for managers and sub-ordinates (Small Business – Chron, 1999).

360 degree feedback

360 degree feedback is a system or process in which employees receive anonymous feedback from the people who work around them (Custominsight, 2013). In this process the employee not only gets feedback from its superiors but also from their peers, sub-ordinates and sometimes from their clients providing their perspectives about the employee; in this way the manager and leader can check the strength and weakness of the employee.

Above the entire appraisal it is found that 360 Degree Feedback will be well suited for the proper development of the company; 360 degree is not an easy method of conducting a performance appraisal as the records should be kept confidential so that it does not cause resentment between workers but it simplifies the perspective of one towards the other. This method will be taken place according to the goals and values of the organization; it will not only look for the basic skills, job requirements and performance objectives but will be more concern on behaviors and capabilities.

The approval of 360-degree feedback is undisputable. Thus far, the supposed benefits will help the personal development of workers only in the right structural environment. When this method is operated in the wrong environment, the results can be harmful. With close deliberation and assessment of the environment, the decision to employ this tool, or another, should be made carefully.

Task 3

Prepare a SWOT (Strengths, weakness, opportunities, threat) analysis of the organization considering the objectives how you have for the club, and develop an action plan for the next three months. Justify how your action plan will help your organization to meet its aim and objectives. (4.1, 2.2)

SWOT analysis is undertaken when a newly formed business wants to recognize the potentially the most successful opportunities or an established firm to analyze their current position in the market place. SWOT analysis determines the future direction and success of the business. It comprises of:

S= Strength, W= Weakness, O= Opportunities, T= Threat.

Strength

International brand security system.

Capable of producing around 50 software designers, hardware engineer in a month.

First complete household security system in Nepal.

Providing our services in lower prices in comparison to other companies’ services.

Weakness

Limited showrooms opened right now.

Company only provides the best system due to which there are limited choices.

Staff turnover high especially amongst part time staff

Opportunities

Expansion into consumer technology business.

Increasing importance of virtualization.

Software plus service.

Threats

Strength of customers such as IT Vision, InfoSys and Mercantile.

Changing customers taste in software.

Threat of piracy

Open source model

We have various targets to meet our long term plans and our plans are setting up from months to months. Basically we have few small plans that needs to be acknowledges carefully so we have a great base for a bright future.

Action Steps to be taken

By when

Resources needed

Barriers

Meeting to open a showroom of security system for household and offices

Within 1st month

Meeting time.

Holding and facilitating effective meeting.

Coaching for safety questions.

Making time to have meeting.

Confusion on what is being asked of establishment and why?

Meeting to open a new branch in Pokhara for tourism industry.

Within 3rd month

Meeting time.

Holding and facilitating effective meeting.

Coaching for safety questions.

Struggle and no confidence to report after adverse significances.

Lack of managerial manpower.

Financial Crisis.

Meeting to be held for establishing Ecommerce Site

Within 2nd month

Meeting time.

Holding and facilitating effective meeting.

Coaching for safety questions.

Making time to have meeting.

Introducing new system.

Developing a new base ground of economy in the organization.

Review of the manpower produced.

Within 3rd month

Time to do the work.

Computer/internet.

Reporting and investigating.

Employee involvement.

Availability of existing paperwork.

These are the major actions that are to be held up to reach the objectives and aim of the organization. Our organization has set a aim to cover national boundaries and without these action covered we will not be able to do that. Objectives are the small points that mainly are focused by our action plan schedule so that we can easily access and complete them before we are late to do so.

Task 4

How do you define a problem? Identify two major problems that you are facing in the organization. Discuss with example what strategies and problem solving methods will you advise your team members to solve these problems? (4.1, 4.3)

Problem is an unwanted situation or environment that is created due to misunderstandings or misdirected leadings with a solution that might be difficult or easy to meet. According to Businessdictonary (n.d),"Problem is a made-up gap between the existing state and a wanted state, or an abnormality from a norm or standard. Although many problems turn out to have several solutions (the means to close the gap or correct the deviation), difficulties arise where such means are either not obvious or are not immediately available."

Our organization has a mission of acquiring the whole Nepalese market of Information Technology and since we still are in the developing state, we are facing many obstacles in our way. There are two major problems that we are facing in our organization; as we are growing big we are getting low on our finance, our company’s revenue and expenditure are stated twice the previous years. Other problem is we have skilled manpower in technical field but we are having problem in hiring manpower from the management field; our human resource department is having problem in fulfilling the lack of manpower for our new branches.

Basically we have different problems in our organization they vary from each other but it does not mean they don’t have a solution, every problem has its solution it is just that some we get late and some early. In the enrollment of management personal the human resource department should follow the trial and error method where we can try different type of solution or questionaries’ in finding the right employee to enroll (Cherry, n.d.). For example as we discussed before in about judging employee on the basis of unstructured interview (Historylearningsite, 1974); in the same way we can judge the interviewee by asking behavioral, moral and strategic questions and grade them according to their standard of answer or respond. Employee should not always be judged by the academic statements or proposal as in the real environment of business we would need practical work and members to tackle with the real problem in the real world.

Eventually we are tackling with another problem which is very tacky to the previous one; financial crisis is one of the major problems we are currently tackling as we are expanding our business rapidly all over the country. But as there is a great proverb "Where there is a will there is a way." as we are an IT company and we are specialized in this sector of business we should try to tackle the problem staying in this state; for this we would be taking help of Pareto’s Principle 80/20 of solving problem. Mostly today business is going overseas through ecommerce and we being IT Company can easily establish ecommerce site and run with a least expenditure. In sales: 80% of a business comes from 20% of a customer base, in productivity: 80% of a accomplishments come from 20% of a task list in the same way in IT sales: 80% of cash inflow comes from 20% of ecommerce site (Gregory, 2010). For example we produce high skilled manpower and these high skilled manpower’s are capable to providing us with a high quality, efficient and dynamic ecommerce site which will not only make the updating job easy but also cash transaction through PayPal services. In this way we can generate extra cash from ecommerce when we are doing the job physical providing service to customers in our showroom and offices.

These are all the major problems with a strategic solving method and solution that would be helpful for the organization in regaining its state quickly and easily with less effort and waste of time.