The COVID-19 outbreak underscores the need for a robust response in terms of crisis management

But what exactly do we mean by robust? What qualities will we demand from digital leadership – not just now, but after we return to a state of normality?

The coronavirus started slowly, undermining our lives and attitudes and accelerating the continuousNEXT gradually. Things are changing on a daily basis now, and the speed of our reactions is an increasingly crucial factor.

Remote office

People are now having to work remotely, in virtual teams and online environments to deal with tasks and initiatives that in many cases never existed before. There are technical collaboration challenges to overcome, but other challenges face us as well.

In corporate terms, staff and human resources in general have been affected worst by the coronavirus. Long before the pandemic arrived, human resources had risen to become the critical path of almost any initiative – more vital than scheduling, budget or time constraints.

This challenge has been exacerbated by the fact that only a few organizations prioritise the transparency of their resources. Now COVID-19 is forcing people to accept paid time off, unpaid absence or remote working, mostly from home. In the light of this pandemic, transparency is not to be confused with monitoring. Transparency here means that leaders have full knowledge of corporate resources, company objectives and individual roles, capacities, skills and experience. The concept of “agile transformation” hasn’t necessarily eradicated the resulting need for better resource management capabilities over recent years. Unfortunately, in many cases it’s done the opposite, shifting attention from a matrix organization silo to another (products). The problem with this is that corporations have again missed the opportunity to capture the foundation of human resources – the digital talent base. This has come about because most senior managers consider that the re-organization towards dedicated teams is a one-size-fits-all remedy for corporate problems and that everything in the garden is going to be rosy once this remedy has been applied.

The companies that comprise our client base took action to optimise resource management challenges in the past, and these companies are now running on the inside track. Wherever their resources work from and whatever they work on, there is one reliable single point of truth: these firms can now regroup cross-functional resources to ad-hoc tasks and teams as well as identifying and managing bottlenecks. Does it make crisis management easier? Very much so.

The most precious corporate assets lie within us. It’s the people and what they bring to the table that make great things possible. Being short on resources – whether in terms of corporate transparency or FTE’s – can lead to rapid failure and shutdown. Crisis management is about people, just like resource management.

As well as our expertise in fast tracking and best practice – the state of the art resource management tool Tempus Resource automates almost every challenge in the process of organizational change and resource and portfolio management for decision makers. Tempus Resource provides exactly what fast and reliable decision-making demands: powerful and real-time what-if simulations. Now your company can kick-start this process with a spreadsheet upload and a trial.

We at VALKEEN want to encourage you to act – even during the pandemic. There is no reason to put off starting your own digital talent base now.

Stay on top of the challenge and please, stay safe.