^The APQC Blog

I never really thought of myself as a process person. In college I was a student focused on a specific discipline’s methodologies and theories. Then I was a researcher applying those methodologies to understand best practices for functional disciplines.  It wasn’t until that job, conducting best practice research for functions, that it started to dawn on me  –  I’m a process person at my core.

13 Retailers made the 2015 Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For^® list

Try Googling “working in retail.” You will not only find the top ranked search results are all negative, but also you will see that many of the remaining results contain words like crazy, worst, tough, hardship, problem, and demeaning. There is a lot of negative press about the experience of retail employees. There are even entire websites dedicated to documenting the daily challenges that retail employees face.

Risk within the supply chain has become a growing concern for many organizations. Although natural disasters such as tsunamis and inclement weather often get the most attention, organizations should also be concerned with risks that can impact the systems supporting their day-to-day operations. One such risk is the potential for IT disruptions.

This month, the Busines Performance Innovation (BPI) Network published a report, Innovation: The New Competitive Equation. The report examines innovation strategies and roadblocks in today's enterprise. According to the report, 79% of survey respondents currently rate their companies' commitment to innovation as very high or growing. While the intention is there, companies are still experiencing significant roadblocks.  

As we started to prepare for 2015, APQC surveyed over 300 business excellence practitioners to understand their common challenges and priorities for upcoming year, including project management. What we found was that project managers continue to struggle with several project portfolio challenges, from ensuring the right mix of projects to meet organizational goals to evolving their measures to capture projects’ value to the organization.  This infographic explores the top challenges in project management and provides some simple tips for addressing them.

Lessons from SAS, One of the World’s Best Workplaces.

In the first three installments of this blog series we’ve discussed practical and tactical steps to:

I was recently able to speak with Jim DeLoach, a managing director at Protiviti, about how the implemention of the updated Committee of Sponsoring Organizations (COSO) Internal Control – Integrated Framework (Framework) during 2014 has been an important endeavor for many public companies in their efforts to comply with Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX).

Jim and his colleague, Keith Kawashima, also a managing director, will be speaking on our free webinar on April 22 at 11:00 a.m. CDT: COSO 2013 - Why Should You Still Care?

In my last musings, I pondered the impending death of knowledge management but never really came to a conclusion regarding its health: that is, whether or not we find it today on life support. The reason was due to a trip down memory lane, but that’s simply because I see that the parallels between digital computing and knowledge management are many (think: centralized, then decentralized, then centralized again, then decentralized again, then centralized making a comeback).

As a trained researcher, I’ve always been fascinated with using quantitative methods to predict human behavior in a number of settings. Although different business functions such as finance, logistics, and marketing are more mature in their use of predictive analytics to guide their business decisions, it is fairly new to HR. However, predictive workforce analytics can help the business figure out a number of challenges such as: