Think about the planning required for changes affecting the platforms, applications, and data within your department. Many leaders start by updating an architectural diagram to validate current state, before creating a visual document illustrating future state.
But what about your department’s organizational chart? Regardless of staff size, do you have a plan on paper that reflects your team’s current state and creates a roadmap for what it will look like in the future?
Knowing when to hire next is a management skill gained by experience, but let’s accelerate the curve by applying a little science to the art.
Knowing when to hire has a lot benefits, including:
- Preventing stalled growth within the company by avoiding staffing related bottlenecks where expanding your customer or supplier integration capacity is concerned.
- Allowing for more choice at the time of hiring versus hiring from a reactionary position.
- Avoiding the risk of burning out existing staff because the long term workload increase in either volume or complexity has outpaced team growth.
- Ensuring each person within your EDI or Integration team is focused on tasks that align with their highest and best purpose to the organization.
To gain the benefits of hiring on time, develop a personal plan for hiring taking into account the metrics, trends, and circumstances you can regularly assess such as:
- Transaction volume and complexity.
- Trading partner census and future onboarding plans.
- Short and long term sales forecasts.
- Overall company growth, acquisition, or expansion plans.
- Companywide and IT specific initiatives that may be dependent on your team for success.
- The career growth and development needs of existing staff.
- Gaps that prevent utilization of current technology to its fullest potential.
- Other leading indicators specific to your environment.
Insufficient planning prevents us from seeing the early trends, conditions, and metrics that indicate a need for additional staff. Being left behind the hiring curve, a compressed timeframe in which to hire often results in fewer candidate choices, added stress, and rushed onboarding of any eventual new hire.
Conversely, thinking ahead about where the company and your department will be 6, 12, and 18 months from now will pay big dividends in terms of a having a better informed sense for when to make your next hire along with the justifications for doing so.
Need to talk about the state of your Integration team, technology, or initiatives? Remedi helps our clients meet current and future challenges everyday by assisting with project based initiatives and providing permanent placement services.
