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Maximizing Resources to Achieve

Business Success

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name: Nina Ralea

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Table of Contents

The resources needed by organizations in different business sectors of the economy (1.1).....3
How and why resources must be monitored (2.1)......................................................................4
What is meant by benchmarking and how this is used by organizations to monitor resources?
(2.2)............................................................................................................................................5
What is meant by performance indicators and how they are used by organizations to monitor
human resources? (2.3)..............................................................................................................6
Describes the new technologies available to organizations and explain how they are used (3.1
and 3.2).......................................................................................................................................8
Identify and explain the key skills needed by a successful project manager (4.1)....................8
Describe the Three Stage-Project Cycle (4.2)............................................................................9
Explain why it is important to identify and rank a project’s critical factor (4.3).......................9
Explain the tools used for managing projects (4.4)..................................................................11
Explain the purpose and importance of project evaluation and review (4.5)...........................11
Explain the terms ‘excellence’ and ‘quality’ and the impact of these concepts on organizations
(5.1)..........................................................................................................................................12
Describe tools and techniques that are used by organizations to ensure the quality of their
products and services (5.2).......................................................................................................13
References:...............................................................................................................................14

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The resources needed by organizations in different business sectors of the economy (1.1).

Resources are something that one uses to achieve an objective. There are many resources needed
by the organization like human resource, financial resource, physical resource, and information
resource to achieve their business goals.

Now we look at each of these sectors differently – 

Primary sector 

The primary sector is the first sector in the economy which deals with the primary industry
which is concerned with the extraction of raw materials. These include extraction and mining of
raw items like coal, petroleum, natural gas, fishing, forestry, etc. from earth’s surface which can
be further used in producing the finished goods. 

Secondary sector

The secondary sector comes after the primary sector and deals with the construction and
production of finished products/goods which is used by other industries or customers.

The human resource here required is semi-skilled and skilled labor. Depending upon the nature
of the process/work both types of human resources are required to save time and bring more
efficiency in the workplace. 

A large amount of financial resources is required as this sector is more technologically advanced.
The cost of machinery, factory/plant setup and rent and wages are high so large amount of
financial support is required.

The physical resources required in this sector are raw materials, land, machinery, building,
storage location, energy, etc. for manufacturing and stock of finished products.

Tertiary sector

This sector is the third economic sector and deals in services, not goods, to consumers and other
organizations. Services like transportation, distribution, entertainment, etc. are provided to end-
users.

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The human resources here play an important role as this sector provides services so majorly
skilled labor is required in this sector.

The financial resources here can be used in hiring skilled laborers and in training them to get
more out of them and keep them efficient and updated with the services in the market. 

The information resources like employee data, training data, and services offered are required to
help them in promotion and incentives and also customer data to keep a record of the common
problems and their solutions help to improve the services.

How and why resources must be monitored (2.1)

Monitoring is surveillance or continuous or regular observation of resources or people to detect

signals, movements, or changes of state or quality. The monitoring helps to check the changes
detected in a given time frame and help in inferencing how things change over time and how
much it changes etc.

The benefits of monitoring are –

1. Regular or interval monitoring helps the owners as well as the investors, stockholders,
government institutions, etc. to get information about the business progress.
2. 3It also helps within-firm comparison with previous reports with this year's reports and
can help in setting the goals and figures and make necessary amendments in the process
if required.
3. Monitoring can also act as keeping an eye to the system and alert to the possible outside
threat. It also keeps eye on employee making them working effectively and efficiently
without burning out time on roaming freely and make them feel like they are being
watched and their progress is recorded at every stage.
4. It helps in finding the anomalies in the process and can be helped in fixing or come up
with ways to improve.
5. Regular monitoring helps in changing the process if it underperforming and make timely
changes without affecting the whole process.
6. What is meant by benchmarking and how this is used by organizations to monitor
resources? (2.2)

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Benchmarking is the process of evaluating firm performance concerning other firms within the
same industry.

The main focus of benchmarking is to keep an eye on three dimensions which are – time, cost,
and quality. (Watson, Gregory H., 1992)

The four phases of Benchmarking are -

In the first phase, planning, the idea is to identify what to benchmark i.e. what activities or
processes have to benchmark for comparison.

In the second phase, the analysis, the data collected in the previous stage is analyzed.

In the third phase, integration, the results and findings should be communicated to the
employees of the firm.

In the last phase, action, proper monitoring, and systematic evaluation should be carried out. The
KPI is effective if:

It is well-defined and quantitative i.e. it should be connected with the business objective and also
it will be communicated throughout the organization or in a particular department to know
everyone that they are working in the right direction with having a clear objective.

What is meant by performance indicators and how they are used by organizations to
monitor human resources? (2.3)

The performance indicators are used to measure the performance of the business. At the higher
level, KPI will cover the overall business objectives while at a low level it covers the
process/activities at each level or department.

It should be well-defined and quantitative i.e. the KPI should be connected with the business
objective and it can be communicated at all levels of the organization to understand everyone
what to achieve and they are moving in the right direction or not.

The KPI can be used to evaluate the financial metrics, customer metrics, process metrics, and
people metrics.

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The financial metrics are used to check the financial statements of the organization. The
customer metrics are used to gauge the firm-customer relationship and measuring the value of
customers to you and you to them.

The process metrics include cycle time, productivity, error rate, throughput, turnaround time, etc.
This checks if the process is performing optimal or not and gives the various result to match with
the actual time and see if it is underperforming or not.

The people metrics can be seen as HR metrics and are focused on employees of the firm. Some
KPIs in this are – revenue per employee, performance, and potential, absenteeism, employee
satisfaction, employee turnover rate, etc.

Describes the new technologies available to organizations and explain how they are used
(3.1 and 3.2)

Emails

Emails are one of the most widely used modes of communication within the organization at each
level (Lucas, W., 1998). It makes communication easier, cost-effective, and faster and also
maintaining the code of conduct and authenticity of the user and can act as a copy of proof if
there is any confusion or chaos between the parties or persons on any of the information.

Social Networking Sites

Exponential growth on social media apps makes the connectivity more reachable and easier from
one corner of the world to another corner.

Software applications

Software applications are a crucial part of the organization as they support, improve, and
automate the business process and increases productivity.

As the complexity of the problem and volume of data increased doing it by hand is nearly
impossible, so these applications are used to solve those problems for us within the time frame. 

Webinar

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Webinars are also becoming an integral part of the organization.

Smart Phones

The role of smartphones in the business organization has increased rapidly because of the more
advancement in features in phones as well as for smooth communication between the parties and
persons even in remote areas.

Internet

Thanks to the internet that now things not only confined to offline but also emerged online.

Zoom and Internet supported video calling portals: Through Skype, Zoom, Google Meet, etc.
companies are engaging and attending their employees in the business process and project from
anywhere they are.

Identify and explain the key skills needed by a successful project manager (4.1)

The project manager needs to be very well versed with all type of skills that helps him to
success. Some of them are:

Analytical Skills: It is the skills that deal with collecting, analyzing, and interpreting information
and used them to solve the problems and turn them into decision making. These skills require
critical thinking, attention to detail, decision making, and researching skills.

Communication Skills: It is the skill that aims at effective and barrier-free communication
between the persons or parties at any level.

Resource Allocation Skills: This skill aims to allocate the resources, be it human or capital or
technology, to the processes or activities to avoid any wastage and conducting the smooth and
efficient flow of work.

Team Management Skills: It is the skill that helps an individual or an organization to handle the
group of people to perform a task without any chaos.

With the help of these skills, the project manager can cope with any situation and leads his/her
team with the fruitful result.

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Describe the Three Stage-Project Cycle (4.2)

The three stages of the project cycle have been explained below:

Initiation and Planning: In the first phase, there is an initialization of the project objective and
its purpose. The budget of the project, human resources, tools, and techniques, etc. also needs to
specify. A detailed study is done and so finalize the expected solution, justification, and
feasibility related to the project.

Execution and control: This is the stage where most of the time is spent. In execution, the plan
formed and discussed above now has to be executed and bring in motion. The actual work on the
project is carried out and the result at each phase is measured and compared with the expected
result and any deviation if it is recorded.

Closure: This is the last stage and all the work and tasks are completed and hence the project
comes to an end but one important still needs to be done that is final deliverable to the customer
for whom you have done all this.

Explain why it is important to identify and rank a project’s critical factor (4.3)

A project has many factors that need to be looked upon constantly for measuring and tracking the
progress. But some factors are very important than others and hence called critical factors. It is
important to identify them to complete the project mission with everyone focuses on what is
important.

There are some areas of CSF which organization looked into and are discussed below –

Industry CSF: These arise not from an individual organization rather from specific industry
characteristics. Hence companies in whatever sector/industry they belong to will have to work on
these factors to compete in that market.

Environment CSF: These are the external factors that have an indirect effect on the
organization like political, economic, social, and technological. Focusing on these CSFs will help
managers to understand environmental factors better and hence PEST Analysis technique is
used.

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Temporal CSF: These are the factors used for short-term situations. To handle specific
challenges, barriers, and situations these temporal or one-time factors are to be considered to
provide internal growth.

It is being noted that CSF is different from KPI. CSF is the cause of your success while KPI is
the effect of your action. It means that if you identified your CSFs and executing them and you
identified your KPIs and meeting them then the project is called to be successful.  

Explain the tools used for managing projects (4.4)

Waterfall Technique: This technique is also known as a common-sense approach. In this, the
model divides the life cycle into a set of phases. This model considers that one phase can be
started after the completion of the previous phase. Thus the development process can be
considered as a sequential flow in the water.

Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT): It is a technique that is for projects in
which activity time is uncertain and hence find out the minimum and maximum time is taken to
complete the activity. It is a tool of planning and control of time.

Critical Path Method Technique: In this technique, the activity time is known with certainty.
CPM is usually used for the construction and maintenance project in which each activity time is

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known with certainty. It is called activity-oriented as the emphasis is more on activities. Delay in
completion of any activity will result in a delay in the project too.

Control Charts: It is a statistical tool used to see how the process changes over time. It has three
lines upper control limit, lower control limit, and central average line. These lines are made of
historical or past data and act as a comparison with current data and see the behavior of the

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curves formed from present data are statistically controlled or not.

Explain the purpose and importance of project evaluation and review (4.5)

Identifying risks and problems: Arising risks and facing problems are an integral part of every
activity but left unnoticed create difficulties in the project completion and deviate the result from
the actual output.

Quality check of Project: The success of the project is not when it is completed but measure
through the quality of the project too. So project evaluation and review ensure and keep the
check on the quality of the project at each stage by verifying and validating the results of each
stage and ensure corrective steps to rectify it if possible.

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Time Management: Every project is bound with time and hence project taking too much time to
complete costs more to the organization and so brings inefficiency and wastage of resources.

Explain the terms ‘excellence’ and ‘quality’ and the impact of these concepts on
organizations (5.1)

Excellence means delivering consistently superior performance that exceeds the anticipation and
the necessity without indicating substantial flaws or errors whereas quality on the other hand can
be described as the grade of excellence of something.

Excellence

There is not even a single shortcut for organizational excellence. An organization has to take
multiple steps or a multi-channel approach to optimize or improve their business performance.

Strategic decision: To gain excellence, it is very much important, to begin with understanding
the purpose of the organization.

Applied metrics: Metrics can help the organization to store information effectively and
efficiently. It gives a balanced approach to the organization to effectively track their data and
find different ways to monitor them. E.g. the Marketing department can use google analytics
matrix to see how well their campaigns are running and so on.

Strategic communication: Once strategic decisions and metrics are applied, to gain excellence
in the workplace, an organization has to ensure that the right channel of communication should
be used to communicate values and expectations to the people at each level. Organizations must
ensure that strategic communication should be two ways.

Strategic hiring: To have excellence in the workplace, strategic hiring is a must. It reduces staff
turnover, improves efficiency at the workplace, same time reduces the requirement cost of the
company.

Quality

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Quality affects almost all the facets of the organization, be it productivity or profitability. Quality
can affect the perception of the company in the eyes of the public.

Customer Loyalty: A good quality product or service will surely gain customer loyalty. A
customer would be happy with that company which can promise the quality of their product and
services.

Brand Image: Quality will not only help in increasing customer loyalty but at the same time, it
will help the organization to create its brand image in the market.

Increased Market Share: An organization that offers good quality and excellence will have
increased market share. A quality product has a good potential to capture the largest share of the
market.

Describe tools and techniques that are used by organizations to ensure the quality of their
products and services (5.2)

Total Quality Management: It is a technique that focuses on customer satisfaction which can be
done by continuous improvement in the product or services. It means all the elements who
contribute to the development of products or services be it HR, technology, communication,
training, etc. works at their best level.

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Balanced Scorecard (BSC): It is a technique to measure the organization's performance by

recognizing and better managing business activities. It helps organizations to know if they are
moving righteously. It is being used by different types of organizations like Corporations,

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Governmental, Non-Governmental.

Quality Culture: There is a difference in meeting the quality standards and between creating a
quality culture. The first one focusing on meeting and delivering quality products or services to
its customer while later one signifies incorporating the quality work and ethics in the
organization not only for projects but also for daily routines.

References:

Corrigan, J. (1995) The art of TQM. Quality Progress 28, 61-64 Parmenter, (2010). Key
Performance Indicators (KPI). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.

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Fallows, D. (2002). Email at Work. (P. I. Project, Ed.)

Kaplan, Robert S., and David P. Norton. (1996). The Balanced Scorecard. Boston, Mass.:
Harvard Business School Press.

Lucas, W. (1998). Effects of e-mail on the organization. European Management Journal, 16, 18-
29.

Meredith, J.R. & Mantel, S.J. 2000. Project management: A managerial approach, 4 th Ed. New
York: Wiley.

Tidd, J. and Bessant, J. (2009) Integrating Technological, Market and Organisational Change,

4th edn, Chichester.

Watson, Gregory H. (1992). The Benchmarking Workbook: Adapting Best Practices for

Performance Improvement. Portland.

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