HR Management in the Small Business Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

HR Management in the Small Business - Essay Example In both small and large businesses, the major functions of HR management are recruitment, selection, training, and compensation of employees (Longenecker et al., 2011). However, not all-small businesses are able to have a full functioning HR management system that can handle the above-mentioned activities in formal and efficient ways. As a result, small businesses are forced to choose to either run these activities informally or outsource them to another organization. The small businesses due to their size and level of income are in most cases not able to adapt new technologies that have been developing to improve efficiency in managing human resources. One of such technologies is the Human Resource Management System that can provide information necessary for effective decision-making (Mathis & Jackson, 2011). As a result, small business is forced to employ the outdated method of decision making which can be inefficient in our current era. Another reason that makes small business not to use such technologies is that they do not prioritize the management of human resources. Majorities of the small businesses are not able to maintain an HR department with fully qualified HR professionals necessary for effective and formal HR management. In such organizations, the owner of the business or a clerical employee who is employed to do so carries out the HR roles. Moreover, in case of new employees who are hired, the supervisors and managers do the recruiting, selecting and training (Mathis & Jackson, 2011). Due to the limitation in the HR knowledge of the people tasked with HR management mandate in small businesses, it is always found out that in most cases they fail to meet standards required. Some of these HR activities are time consuming and, thus, they largely reduce the time the people assigned to undertake them have to focus on their main role in the business. Most of these small businesses decide to outsource most of their HR activities to another organization. The outsourcing process means that a business contracts or hires another business or organization to undertake certain activities in the business on its behalf (Mathis & Jackson, 2011). The outsourced activities might be recruiting, selecting and training of employees as well as managing its HR records and employees compensations. In such a case, this helps the people involved in running the business to focus mainly on their area of specialization and, thus, makes them to be more efficient in their roles. Furthermore, it enables the business to acquire services of HR specialist in undertaking its HR activities that can result in more efficiency despite their size. The major reason why most of the small business chooses not to have an HR department to handle HR activities and issues is the relatively low interest in human resource management in their different stages of operation (Cornelius, 2001). In most cases, it is very difficult to convince a manager or owner about the fundament al contributions of an HR department in the success of their business. This makes them not to prioritize it and most of them only plan to introduce them when their businesses grow to become large corporate. However, these individuals should be convinced about the role that properly managed human resources can play in resolving their

Project Management The effectiveness of the plans Essay

Project Management The effectiveness of the plans - Essay Example Project management is the planning, organizing, directing and controlling of company resources for a relatively short-term objective that has been established to complete specific goals and objectives. For planning and organizing the resources, Program evaluation and review technique(PERT) and Critical Path Method (CPM) are widely used techniques for better planning and control in project management. It forms the basis for all planning and predicting and these techniques provide the management with the ability to plan for the best possible use of resources to achieve a goal within the stipulated time and allotted budget. These techniques which were used for defense during the World War II, are now used by business managers across the world to get a visibility of the activities involved in the project so that repetition of activities is reduced. It helps the management to handle the uncertainties involved in the program by analyzing how much time is required for each activity and which activity is crucial for the timely completion of the project. It is useful for the management to collect all the relevant information for making decisions. The major deficiency of other methods such as the Gantt, milestone or bubble chart is the inability to show the interdependencies between event s and activities, which is overcome in the network analysis. The foremost advantage of PERT is that it requires planning in detail to create a network of activities. Network development and critical path analysis reveal interdependencies and problem areas that are not very clear if other methods are used. The technique lays its focus on determining where the greatest effort should be made for a project to stay on schedule. The next greatest advantage of network analysis is that the business manager can know about the probability of meeting specified deadlines by development of alternative plans. Another advantage of this analysis is that we can evaluate the effect of changes in the program. For example this technique can evaluate the effect of contemplated shift of resources from the less critical activities to the activities that are identified as probable bottlenecks. Thus resources and performance tradeoffs can be evaluated. This analysis also helps to present even the most complicated data into a diagram which can be presented to the custo mer/ management which makes the understanding and decision making easier. The network diagram and the calculation of total float is shown in the appendix - 1 and 2 respectively. The total project duration is 73 days and the critical path for the project includes the activities A, B, I, J, L, M, N, O, P, R. If the project starts on May 5th, 2008, the earliest date it will be completed is 13th August, 2008 if it is assumed that there are 5 days working in every week. From the analysis, we can say that when there is a 4 day delay during Q or E, there will not be any change because these activities are not a part of the critical path. When activity P is finished one day in advance, then the whole project will