At Acorn, we have many years of experience of accelerating bid team performance, whether accelerating the alliance of a number of companies coming together, or optimising the diversity of ideas within a single business. Common to all situations is the need for the bid team to create a key differentiator from its competitors.
UK firms need to be in a position of strength to thrive rather than survive, and high productivity is crucial to competing in the coming new world. Mike Pezet shares his view on how effective coaching and development helps line managers build their understanding, confidence and ability to lead and engage employees.
The training and development of your staff costs money – a lot of money – so it needs to add real value to your business. Acorn focus on making sure all our training and coaching is practical, realistic and in line with business goals. We also make sure you get the best value possible from your training and coaching investment.
The success of safety improvement in the last 20 years or so has valuable lessons for other aspects of the organisation. Dealing with quality issues, slippage of project costs and schedules, and how to foster innovation to compete with other businesses are all areas ripe for the deliberate application of safety thinking.
Despite the economic recovery now becoming mature, and many sectors being finally ‘on the up’, the economic pressure on projects is ever present, with tighter margins and an increased need to deliver the product on time and within budget. Project performance is equally if not more critical than it was several years ago.
Based on our experiences in the graduate sector, here we share our advice for designing successful graduate programmes that will retain and develop your new talent as quickly as possible.
Acorn’s 20 years of experience of working with complex projects within the construction and infrastructure business leads us to believe there to be three key issues that impact project success.
Acorn have worked in project-related businesses for over 20 years, gathering cross-sector knowledge from diverse industries from nuclear to defence, pharmaceuticals to construction and infrastructure. Supplementing our knowledge with research, we have summarised the key issues occurring within major projects, offering possible solutions.
Key industry sectors are facing a worrying shortfall in leadership capability as they move into a period of activity following economic challenge. Understandably, many businesses stripped out or froze their investment in personnel as they sought to reduce overheads in the face of a declining or static balance sheet.
Can training and development programmes really be measured and evaluated in a tangible way? This is probably one of the most commonly asked questions prior to making a commitment to any large investment and to an organisation-wide project. Training can be evaluated but, more importantly, we believe it SHOULD be evaluated.