• Problem
• Purpose
• Objectives
• Strategies and Schedule
• Project Evaluation
• Participants
• Budget
• References

Immature high technologies companies have a fundamental problem. They tend to have a largely immature and untrained management staff. The same is true for Liberate Technologies in San Carlos, California.

Liberate has been in the business of supplying the software to other businesses to compete in the "information appliance" revolution for about four years. What started out a the merging of two "pet" projects of Oracle and Netscape, the current business of producing client/server technology for cable set top boxes to provide websurfing and other applications on the common household television was born.

True to the nature of high technology companies, Liberate's products and their schedules have change radically and frequently. Several projects were started, only to see an early demise when the it turned out that the market was not there. Now on a highly successful product track, the pressures to advance the projects to market more quickly have been heighten more than ever. Such is the life of a high technology company.

Within this unpredictable environment, companies emerging industry are caught in a difficult situation. High technology is highly competitive and there are few pre-existing guidelines. If they do not get to market and become profitable quickly, they risk success in the industry and the backing of stockholders. This affords companies like this very little incentive to make the time and resource commitment necessary to properly train their managers early on in their life cycle.

Once the momentum of growth begins, the existing managers are likely to be functional, but not ready for long-term management requirements of a growing staff. When the chaos of start up life begins to fade, the managers need to be able to attend to the everyday tasks that every manager experiences.

Nature of the Problem

Employees are promoted or hired into management positions are not informed of current company policies, procedures and guidelines for company managers. The mission and goals of the company are not shared with the new managers. Before incidences arise, managers are not formally trained on the basic company guidelines for staff management or procedures for implementing manager duties, such as the hiring process. This is caused by lack of a training program or manual.

Consequences of the Problem

In the long run, the continued practice of not properly training managers and expending the cost of improving the consistency of the managerial staff will create a company that does not have effective or consistent work flow. Employee retention suffers. Managers who receive transferred employees have had to deal with promises or situations that do not conform to their environment, yet they now have to find a solution to bridge the discrepancy between the tried and true methods of the past and the needs of the current business environment. Growing as a company can become difficult, disjoined, and unclear in the goals it is attempting to achieve. The risk of failure is increased.

The purpose of this project is to develop and implement a training program for managers. This will create a consistent managerial company environment and improve manager knowledge of Human Resource (HR) department policies by the end of the training program.

Why the Project is Important

In the course of the project manager's management duties, it has become clear that the correct process to get certain things done at this particular company were largely learned by asking around until a mix of answers were obtained. As other managers were interviewed, the same uncertainties as to how to handle certain processes was also unclear to them. The company website documents a few of the steps to do standard managerial tasks, such as hiring an employee. However, the site is not as complete or as easy to read as it could be. Combined with the reality that managers in a high technology company are under a great deal of pressure to get the current customer needs met, becoming a more aware and educated manager is thrust to the back burner. This back burner is rarely revisited.

Project Purpose

This project has been designed to address and offer solutions to the problem of educating the company managers. Making the managers more informed as to basic management skills and specific company policies and procedures is the purpose. In the end, it is the additional purpose of this project to give the company a more consistent managerial message, a uniformed operating environment that sends a clear and coordinated message from the management level to the employees, in line with the company mission and goals. A shared vision with all the pieces clearly working towards the same goals in similar fashion as opposed to various pieces assuming where the company is going, each with its own idea of how to get there.

Project Manager's Role

The project manager will be designing the training program, the training manual, and the surveys that will be used to measure the needs of the managers and the project effectiveness. As a current manager at Liberate Technologies, the project manager has experienced the challenges of high technology environment. Frequently, the managers have had to learn procedures and tips on managing well independently of each other. Seeing this waste of resources and the high cost of unsupported managers supported the project manager's nature desire to fix broken links of communication. The project selection was obvious. A manager training program at Liberate should be done.

Alternatives Considered

An alternative to developing an in-house training program for managers was to hired an external consulting firm. This proved to be prohibitive in cost, considering the company current level of maturity and focus onto the direct purpose of conducting and growing its business.
 

There are two objectives of the project. They are:

• Improve new manager knowledge of company policies and guidelines after completing a training program by June 2001.
• Improve company managerial consistency by July 2001.

Objective One

Improve new manager knowledge of company policies and guidelines after completing a training program by June 2001.

To date, there has never been a training program at the company for new managers. After an initial New Employee session with finance to explain the benefits, little else is offered by the company to further educate or develop the employees.

Developing and implementing a new manager training program will allow the Human Resource department to share information on specific company steps and procedures to managers at the same time in a formal setting. This will avoid largely unsuccessful "hit or miss" method that most managers use for discovering the processes at this time.
 

Objective Two

Improve company managerial consistency by July 2001.

Due to the youth of the company, there have been only a few programs or classes offered. These classes are usually only offered on a manager-to-manager basis, which is not widely distributed to the other departments. The quality of support and training an employee receives depends heavily on upon the quality of the manager a given employee reports to.

As the managers are trained in the same manner and armed with the same knowledge, it is expected that the employees will begin to benefit from the best of all the management staff, not just at the level their current manager has been able to grow and learn.

If managerial consistency in the company were to level out and rise, it would make the other managers that "inherit" situations from other managers when employees are transferred less of an issue.

In order to accomplish the objectives of this plan, three are three strategies that will be used. They are:

• Develop and implement a training program that will include topics covering roles and responsibilities, staffing, career path opportunities, company policies, and legal reminders.
• Develop a training manual that will require research of currently available Human Resource materials and external research on staffing management.
• Develop pre- and post-training surveys to measures basic knowledge and needs to indicate change in manager job confidence. The Survey will be distributed to managers before the program and again one month after the program. Feedback data will be analyzed. Survey analysis will be presented to Human Resource and Managing Directors.

Strategies

Objective One

Improve new manager knowledge of company policies and guidelines after completing a training program by June 2001.

The development and implementation of a training program that will include topics covering roles and responsibilities, staffing, career path opportunities, company policies, and legal reminders that will address the issues associated with Objective One.

Objective Two

Improve company managerial consistency by July 2001.

The training program will expose the managers to procedures that are supported by the company. In turn, there will be less risk of individual continuing to act on their own from one another. This will help create a working environment where similar, shared behavior will begin to emerge.

Schedule

The project tasks and their expected completion dates are listed below.
 

Task	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug
Task 1: Develop Surveys
Task 1.1.0: Create multiple choice  urvey to measure pre- and post-training manager knowledge	X	X
Task 1.2.0: Create multiple choice survey to measure pre- and post-training consistency of manager behavior	X	X
Task 1.3.0: Gain feedback from sponsor for final survey content		X
Task 2: Develop Management Training Program
Task 2.1.0: Develop training program curriculum		X	X
Task 2.2.0: Estimate project costs		X	X
Task 2.3.0: Set day and time of training			X
Task 2.4.0: Gain approval of project from QA Director			X
Task 2.5.0: Consult HR Director and HR Trainer with training plans			X
Task 2.6.0: Create Training Manual			X	X
Task 2.6.1: Create the content			X	X
Task 2.6.2: Gain content approval from principle participates.					X
Task 2.6.3: Assemble training manuals.					X
Task 3: Run training program
Task 3.1.0: Notify intended audience of training program					X
Task 3.2.0: Deliver pre-training knowledge and consistency surveys					X
Task 3.3.0: Retrieve pre-training knowledge and consistency surveys					X
Task 3.4.0: Compile pre-training survey results					X
Task 3.5.0: Conduct Training Program						X
Task 4: Training Program Measurement
Task 4.1.0: Deliver post-training knowledge and consistency surveys							X
Task 4.2.0: Retrieve post -training knowledge and consistency surveys							X
Task 4.3.0: Compile post -training survey results							X
Task 5: Provide project results to executive managers

Contingency Plans

In the event, that a company-wide manager training program is not tenable, a pilot program with will be run with the Quality Assurance Managers. The scale of the attendees will be reduced, but all of the project planning, process, goals, and implementation will remain in tact.

No project can be a guaranteed success. Measuring the results of a project must be done to establish the success. If the goals of the project prove to be unmet, alternative courses of action can be evaluated.

• The training program will be evaluated with a pre- and post- training program survey to measure increased knowledge of participants.
• Comparison of survey answers will measure consistency in managerial application.

Improve new manager knowledge of company policies and guidelines after completing a training program by June 2001.

Measure: A survey before and after the manager training program will be conducted. It will be a questionnaire in which the participates will be asked to rate their current knowledge and their implementation of the knowledge.

Method: The survey will be anonymous. It will have 20 questions covering basic management theories and specific company policy questions. The answers will be in the form of a scale from 1 (being the not at all) to 6 (very comfortable) that rate how comfortable the manager feels he knows or enforces company policy, procedures and supported behavior.
 

Objective Two

Improve company managerial consistency by July 2001.

Measure: A survey of the managers before and after the management training program will indicate how uniform the managers respond within the same company environment.

Method: The anonymous survey will contain a eight sample situations that a manager might be expected to experience. There will be a multiple choice of possible answers. A comparison of the manager's answers will show how diverse or not the managers are in their approaches to the problems. The more questions that the managers answer the same, the more consistently they tend to behave.

Additionally, there will be an anonymous survey of the employees before and after the training program. It will have 20 questions covering employee management and company police questions. The answers will be in the form of a scale from 1 (being the not at all) to 6 (very comfortable) that rate how the employee feels that his specific manager knows or enforces company policy, procedures and behavior.
 

Reporting Results

At the completion of the training, the results of the surveys and the project report will be given to the Human Resource department, the Director of Quality Assurance (QA), and the executive staff Liberate Technologies.

Similar to a company, a successful project requires the input of more than one source. This program will be getting assistance from the following resources to help the project research, training goals, training environment.

When implementing any project, the identification sources of the budget and the expenses must be done. Controlling the resources of a project start with the assessment of what time and money are available to budget for the project before it begins.

Budget Description

There are two types of costs when implementing a project: direct and indirect. The direct costs of the project will be the actual cash that is spend on materials and supplies for the development and implementation of the training program. Costs that are indirect will be the value of the time that the participants of the program will be contributing. Indirect costs are difficult to measure precisely, so the formulas that were used in the estimates have been provided below.
 

Cost Justification

Running an internal manager training program is cost effective in the long term. Hiring external training consultants is expensive and does not adequately cover material and processes that are unique to the company itself. Such information is a goal in this training program to help alleviate waste and prompt consistency within the company. Sending a single manager to a managerial training program through the American Manager Association costs $1,500 for the week. The program of this project will be more focused on current needs of the company instead of the AMA program with covers a wide range of material in generalities.

Buying and distributing management books is less costly in up front costs, but does not deliver the company message with it. Also, books can easily put aside to read on a day that never seems to come in our busy work lives.

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