Untitled - Saigontre

Making the Case for Major Change
105
needs of successors who had been nurtured during a period of regulation. It
also prompts developmental activities to increase the market-oriented skills of
future leaders.
Use the worksheet appearing in Exhibit 5-5 to focus attention on ways to
hitchhike on crises and to seize opportunities.
Showing the Bottom-Line Value
A third way to demonstrate the need for a systematic SP&M program might be
called showing the bottom-line value. However, making that case for SP&M
can be tough to do. As Jac Fitz-enz writes:
One of the difficulties in trying to measure the
work of planners is that their output is primarily
a plan of the future. By definition, we will
not know for 1, 3 or perhaps 5 years how accurate
their predictions were. In addition no
one is capable of predicting future events,
and therefore it is not fair to blame the planner
for unforeseeable events. It is impossible
to measure the value of a long-term plan in the
short term. Planners thus often feel frustrated
because they cannot prove their worth with
concrete evidence. 1
Those involved in succession planning and management may feel that they
face exactly the same frustrations to which Fitz-enz alludes. However, he has
suggested ways to measure each of the following:
▲ Workload (How many positions need to be filled?)
▲ Speed of Filling Positions (How long does it take to fill positions?)
▲ Results (How many positions were filled over a given time span?)
Succession planning and management may thus be measured by the number
of key positions to be filled, the length of time required to fill them, and
the number of key positions filled over a given time span. Of course, these
measures are not directly tied to such bottom-line results for an organization
as return on equity, return on investment, or cost-benefit analysis. But they are
good places to start.
As Fitz-enz rightly points out, the central questions to consider when quantifying
program results are these 2 :