Interim Management Team on tasking

Interim Management methodology is a solid alternative to organize critical management jobs, and the advantages it delivers are well known to both employers and talent hunters. The meaning of “interim” as temporary and limited in time, in TMGR opinion, is not the only approach to get the most of IM as a way of adding talent to the organizations – and specially when thinking about teams.

TM=GR* methodology focuses also in IM on tasking (as complementary to the previous IM on project). What do we mean? It refers to IM when interim means part-time and not only temporary. Let’s see some examples:

• Customer Satisfaction Management as a cross-organization function that needs to organize tasks in every area of the company focusing in customer needs and requierements
• Crisis Management, again a cross-organization function, working when the stablished, standard process fails and there is a need of communicating, acting and recovering to lead the company or product to their previous status
• Sales Operation as a way to improve sales efficiency, predictibility and planning

Note that in the examples it is assumed that the main focus is the continuous execution, not a consultancy role to define best practices; and that all of them are core to the company mission.

When does IM on tasking add value? Among others, these are some of the reasons to use this approach.

• The workload is not high enough to devote a whole organization to it, yet the complexity requires a big team and the company wants to keep the knowledge inside.
• It is required as a previous step to out-tasking or off-shoring, when there is no enough knowledge to define how to do the outsourcing and how to measure its performance.
• Knowledge transfer is critical in both directions: to execute the funcion a deep knowledge of the company is needed, and it’s key to have the expertise of the task in house.
• And, of course, being a interim management methodology, the customer company does require commitment and alignment much higher that an out-tasking approach; they need a much deeper mutual knowledge and much more close relationship with the rest of business functions.

So, “interim as temporary” is not the only value, and enterprise should have a look at which functions they can perform as “interim as partial“. They can earn efficiencies and add expertise to the value chain very fast while keeping their key business functions aligned and close to the global strategy.