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Rightsizing
A major clearing Bank faced an extremely difficult HR problem. They had no alternative but to reduce the strength of their Project teams by 5% as part of an imposed significant cost reduction programme. In effect this meant the release of some 200 people out of a total of 4000 project professionals.
The question facing the HR and IT Directors was which 200?
The project teams were all engaged upon strategic and in some cases critical projects so any disruption would be potentially damaging to the Bank's business objectives.
Annual appraisals were one way of filtering out the least vital employees but these had been completed over six months ago and therefore would not necessarily provide a sufficiently reliable source of up-to-date information.
Instead they decided to use Knowledge Assessment to determine the real knowledge level of about 400 members of staff including some who had been offered voluntary redundancy. In conjunction with this they also ran behavioural measurement tests to look at another aspect of integrated assessment. The Diagnostic Assessments were carried out and it became clear that an interesting pattern had emerged. In contrast with the results of the behavioural tests, the Diagnostic Assessments revealed that those who had not had the benefit of recent training, particularly in formal project methods, had failed to meet expectation with regard to their effectiveness in project work and many had noticeably limited knowledge which would impair their going further in terms of project seniority. This information could not have been identified by the use of just behavioural testing.
It now became a relatively straightforward process to isolate those people who would cause the least disruption to the Bank's project work. There then followed the process of interviews for those so identified and with the minimum of delay, the task was complete with no repercussions.
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