Key competencies of the company examples. Key competencies of the company. Examples of managerial competencies

Model (profile) of competencies

To date, the approach to, based on the concept of competence is the most common.

Competences represent personal characteristics a person, his ability to perform certain functions, types of behavior and social roles, such as orientation to the interests of the client, the ability to work in a group.

Competences include both individual characteristics (e.g. teamwork, creativity, communication) and skills (e.g. negotiation or business planning).

The latter definition to a greater extent reveals the concept of competence in terms of recruiting activities, since, as a rule, the assessment is carried out in two directions:

1. personal characteristics(behavioral competencies);
2. assessment of knowledge and skills in the professional field.

Such a distribution should not be considered as a classification of competencies, since each organization formulates its requirements for employees and groups competencies depending on the specifics of a particular position. The development (definition and formulation) of competencies for the employees of the organization is carried out on the basis of the organization's strategy. In this case, it is customary to talk about core competencies of the company.

Key competencies- these are competencies developed at the level of the organization, used to characterize and evaluate its employees, in particular for candidates for vacant positions.

1. Provide value to consumers. When attempting to identify core competencies, an organization should evaluate whether a particular skill contributes to customer perceived value, in other words, whether the competency improves the quality and/or reduces the cost of the service/product provided.

2. To be distinctive that is, unique in its kind, difficult to reproduce by competitors.

3. Ensure the transition to tomorrow's markets. When defining key competencies, it is important to abstract from the qualitative parameters of the product and determine how the existing competencies can be used for production.

The process of forming an organization's competency model can be represented as a diagram shown in fig. 17. As can be seen from the figure, the formation of a profile of key competencies is one of the tasks strategic planning and management of the organization. The content of key competencies follows from the organization's development strategy.

Rice. 17. The scheme of formation of key competencies of the organization

Number of core competencies for different companies may vary. At the same time, their excessive detailing leads to difficulties in the assessment and selection of personnel (for example, in the presence of 50-100 competencies). Each developed competency should be maximally specifically formulated, because the same words, phrases, terms can be interpreted differently in different conditions.

For example, quite often there is such a requirement for candidates as communication skills. However, this term has many parameters.

Candidate Requirements Parameters Example:

Sociability:

• Ability to quickly connect with strangers
• Polite, friendly communication
• The ability to convince
• Ability to speak publicly
• Constant desire to connect with people
• Well delivered speech
• Grammatically correct speech

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The existing terms “competence” and “competence” somewhat repeat each other.

The competence of the company is a set of characteristics of the company that makes it professional at the level of competitors. Competence consists of individual competencies and as a whole is based on competitive and leading technologies. Each of the competencies is an element of general competence.

The term “competence” was coined by W. Makelville in 1982. According to Makelville, competence is a range of problems, a field of activity in which a given person has knowledge and experience; a set of powers, rights and obligations of an official, public organization.

Company competence (business competence) is a set of interrelated skills, abilities and technologies that provide companies with effective solution specific tasks and situations. The company's standard competence is a set of advantages, technologies, abilities, knowledge and skills that allows the company to solve typical tasks for this market segment, to carry out operational processes at a level accepted as a standard.

Since the majority of competitors have standard competencies, the lack of standard competencies leads to the company's rapid disappearance from the market. Many standard competencies are confirmed by licenses and certificates. Sometimes competencies are erroneously referred to as company resources.

There is also personal (individual) competence - a set of personal properties acquired and fixed by an individual (employee) in the course of educational and / or labor activity, a set of knowledge, skills and abilities required for each position.

Objects of personal competencies - employees, positions. Such competencies (key qualifications, soft skills) of employees, as a rule, are a logical consequence of the company's key competencies, business strategy and the business processes that ensure their implementation.

The development of models of personal competencies is carried out by NDT departments and their contractors. Our site does not consider personal competencies.

Key competencies of the company

For successful competition, it is necessary to formulate all the company's competencies and highlight the key ones.

The key (distinctive, basic, exceptional, basic, unique, business competence) competence of the company (the term “critical success factor of the company”, KFU is also used) is such a competence, the presence of which allows the company to solve problems that are beyond the power of most other market players, establishes a new standard of activity in the industry and thus provides the owner with a competitive advantage.

According to G. Hamel and S.K. Prokhalad, a company should be perceived not as a set of business units that make it up, but as a combination of key competencies - skills, abilities, technologies that allow the company to provide its customers with certain values.

The key competence is the strategic potential of the company. Operational management of the company (the ability to effectively conduct business) is a way to capitalize on the potential.

Signs of a key competency: significance for consumers, their willingness to pay for the competency as for the bulk of the acquired value; the ability to change and adapt to new market requirements; uniqueness, low probability of repetition by competitors; based on knowledge, not on coincidence; association with multiple activities or products; relevance, compliance with the strategic aspirations of the market and the company; the possibility of partnership to create a new key competency; clarity, accessibility of the formulation of competence for unambiguous interpretation.

Key competencies can be:

Knowledge of the needs of the market and the ability to regularly receive this knowledge;
the ability to put into practice the proposals required by the market;
the ability to continuously build and develop their core competencies.

Key competency criteria:

Significance to consumers (consumers are willing to pay for it, it creates a large part of the perceived value of the consumer).
Uniqueness (difficulty in reaching other companies).
The possibility of improvement (when new market requirements appear, the competence can be used after a certain modification).
Collaboration (competence may result from the unique interaction of a number of partners, an organization and consumers…).
Competence is based on knowledge (rather than being the result of a unique set of circumstances).

Leading competencies are the advantages in solving those tasks (situations) that will become a zone of competition in the future with increased competition.

The leading competence ensures the company's leadership in the future, it is the presence of those prerequisites that, with appropriate work, can lead to the creation of a unique selling proposition and ensure the company's leadership, entering a new segment:

When done right, core competencies lead to the creation of unique products, provide the company with leadership in entering new markets and significant advantages in solving problems that will become a field of fierce competition.

In a competitive environment, companies seek to protect core competencies in order to maintain a competitive advantage.

A timely understanding of a core competency paves the way for long-term market leadership, and the leadership gained, in turn, requires focusing efforts on a core competency.

Textbook examples of key competency revisions are well known.

Honda, having once changed the key competence of “production of motorcycles” to “production of internal combustion engines”, has become exactly the Honda that the whole world knows today.

SKF, by changing its key competency “ability to produce rolling bearings” to “ability to produce objects of ideal spherical shape”, has opened up new possibilities for their application in sound and video recording, precision mechanics and optics, and other industries.

One way to define a company's core competencies is through identifying key customers, the nature of their needs, and the company's role in meeting those needs. This method allows a customer-oriented company to get an answer to the question “What should we do today and tomorrow to meet customer needs?” However, sometimes this approach makes it impossible to identify a company's distinctive competencies (example is Sony with its products far ahead of market needs).

Identifying distinctive competencies is not just an analysis of strengths; it requires the managerial intuition of the business owner. The statement of competence should be clear, but general enough to remain relevant for a long time.

Examples of competencies:

Existence of a wide distribution network.
Attracting qualified personnel.
Availability of an effective information system.
Consolidation of inventions and rationalization proposals in the form of patents.
High degree of capacity utilization.
Improving product quality (reducing the cost of marriage).
Creation of an efficient and customer-friendly system technical support and service.
The ability to create effective advertising.
Ability to effectively retain the consumer.
The ability to quickly transfer products from idea to industrial production.
Ability to quickly respond to changing market conditions.

Competence levels:

1. Superficial level - instrumental knowledge and skills.
2. The level of intermediate skills - social, communication skills.
3. Normative-value level - standards of behavior in a professional environment.
4. Basic level - personal characteristics, motives, self-esteem.

Key competencies

Key competencies

Competence from the Latin competo - "I achieve, I correspond to the approach." Professional competence, in fact, is the ability to fulfill one's work obligations in accordance with accepted norms and standards, that is, successfully, without control and constant (unplanned) outside help.

The purpose of highlighting competencies is to increase the efficiency (quality and quantity) of the company. If a person can demonstrate the necessary skills and results of work, he suits us. Competences are needed for a preliminary and tracking intermediate assessment of its capabilities, assistance in its development and correction of mistakes, for understanding oneself in the end.

There are many interpretations of the concept of "competence" and, accordingly, approaches to their allocation and use.

1. Key competencies - qualities and personality traits of a professional, allowing to perform the tasks assigned to the employee in accordance with the main business function of the organization and unit.

1. Specific key business competencies— at the level of know-how of the company, taking into account the peculiarities of the corporate culture.
2. A set of competencies for a position from exhaustive set of competitions(will be presented below).
3. Competences presented both personal and professionalqualities(see Attachment 4 ).

The presence of competencies in no way excludes the list pawork evaluation parameters, which competencies can include, otherwise they only disorient managers and employees themselves, turning the assessment into a too superficial and inefficient procedure. How can, for example, replace the quantitative indicators of the work of employees or the assessment of their performance with competencies? appearance, discipline?!

Competences- these are simplified, reduced to absolute understanding and (or) synthesized, isolated from "folklore" definitions (preferably in the working language of managers and employees) of professional and personal properties of successful employees, which are easiest to quickly or in a set with other criteria (parameters) evaluate the work of employees of this company, subject to the presence of a common language of corporate culture.

Competencies as skills and abilities. The differences are that a skill is a specific action with an expected result, while a competency is not usually described in terms of the end result, but can and ultimately should be described or created from it.

In practice, all these approaches intersect and complement each other. For example, as part of the annual performance appraisal or attestation, employees in most companies are also assessed by a set of competencies. Based on the latter, HR departments can draw up success profiles for each position and target levels of competency development for the year ahead in terms of career development and employee professionalism within the company. For any group of positions of a certain specialization, there can and should be their own hierarchy of competencies, possibly from a common exhaustive list. Within this hierarchy, there are 4-7 areas that are most valued - key, or basic, competencies.

For the head of the sales department, the most important are:

■ communicative qualities;

■ organizational skills;

■ client orientation;

■ entrepreneurial and financial approaches. For a literary editor are important:

■ patience;

■ attention;

■ the ability to convince;

■ "innate" literacy.

Below is an example with priorities set for three professional profiles (Table 1).

It is almost always clear to practitioners within the company what they mean by “sociability” or “progressiveness of views”, but in order to prevent misunderstanding, it is still better to fix what it consists of and what it is in the activities of a certain group of employees. Communication skills of a secretary for a client may include:

■ positive self-adjustment;

■ telephone counseling experience;

■ life orientation to help people;

■ personal sociability.

Sociability is “the ability, positively perceiving any client, any call, to be able to quickly understand its essence and direction and respond in accordance with certain cultural norms and in the information field of specified parameters” (formulation of the competence “secretary sociability” from one of the Internet companies. — Note ed.).

The process of working with competencies is best carried out in a technological sequence similar to that shown below. This will allow them to be used with the greatest impact and benefit for all stakeholders within the company.

Full cycle of work with competencies across the organization.

1. Description exhaustive list competencies that are important for the successful work of a group of employees, experts.

1. Allocation of basic (key, core) competencies or, possibly, macro competencies. Macro competencies are unique combinations of professional knowledge, skills and experience, expressed in technologies for creating and distributing products (managerial know-how, intellectual and organizational results), which are difficult to develop and useless to copy.
2. Achieve the required level of detail.

Table 1. Priorities of the three professional profiles 1

Competences	Job title
trade representative active sales	secretary	manager
Ability to quickly establish rapport with strangers	Necessary	Don't care	Desirable
Polite, friendly communication	Necessary	Necessary	Necessary
The ability to convince	Necessary	Desirable	Necessary
Ability to speak publicly	Don't care	Don't care	Necessary
The need for communication	Necessary	Don't care	Desirable
Well delivered speech	Necessary	Desirable	Necessary
Grammatically correct speech	Necessary	Necessary	Necessary

1 Table 1 is based on the book Ivanova S. The Art of Recruiting: How to Rate a Person in an Hour. — M.: Alpina Business Books, 2004. — P. 15.

1. Creation of position success profiles (perhaps within the framework of job descriptions, requirements for positions and vacancies) - standards.
2. Description of the target levels of competence development (using scores or scales) in connection with the development and tasks of the company, as well as the individual development of employees.
3. Setting achievable goals and defining a set of developmental activities: internships, training, etc. Schedule sub-tasks for achieving the target level of competence development, for example, “become more influential”: be able to attract attention, be assertive, justify ideas, actively listen, enlist support, encourage others to action, to negotiate.

7. Identification of indicators of achievement of the level (enlist support from the subtask "become more influential": gain the support of all members of the board of directors).

An example of a tiered (scale) representation of competence (schedule the levels of one of the key competencies of the Leadership block in the Managerial Competence block) can be found in Table. 2.

Table 2. Leadership in foreseeing the future, inspiring employees, strategic planning (as a "lookout" function) to evaluate top managers.

Level	Managerial Competence
	Creates the future of the company. Develops and implements useful standards for engaging employees in effective future planning. Systematically and continuously evaluates the effectiveness of these standards and employee participation
	Actively participates in creating the future of the company. Polyvolume demonstrates the ability to create and formulate a vision of the future of the organization. Involves others in the process of forming a picture of the future. Strengthens faith in this future through their behavior and demonstrated values ​​(personal example)
	Able to assess the importance of developing a picture of the future for the company, participates in the development of ways to achieve it as free time appears or receives direct instructions from shareholders
Fourth	Almost does not think about ways to achieve a picture of the future, is preoccupied with everyday affairs
	Uses rumors, "thinks what is not", not sure about the future, obsessed with routine activities, drowning in everyday affairs, psychologically attached to them

The principles of highlighting key competencies, drawing up standards for the performance of work and customer service are best "seen" through the process of grading employees.

Step-by-step process of grading and standardization of work of employees

1. Selection of grades ( large groups employees close in managerial status, powers and, consequently, the level of payment) and within them categories of employees.

2. Identification and description of the basic blocks of competencies or criteria for evaluating employees. For example, managerial skills, sales skills, professional and specialist knowledge, personal qualities, etc.

3. Prescribing competencies within the basic blocks of competencies for the entire range of categories of employees of all departments of the company. For example, in order to describe the “managerial skills” block, you need to answer the question: what managerial skills are fundamentally necessary for different categories of employees? The ability to conduct meetings (can be broken down in more detail by meeting skills), the ability to write a business plan (can be written in more detail - topics, volumes, tasks, etc.), and more. others

4. Identification of key (most significant) and secondary competencies for different categories of employees and depending on the specifics of the work of specific departments and positions. For example, for call center operators, external data will have a minimum value, and telephone communication skills (signed in detail), typing speed on a PC and the amount of operational, that is, short-term memory, attention switching speed and personal "non-irritability" will have a maximum value.

If necessary, assigning different weight (index) values ​​to key and secondary competencies for blocks of basic competencies and within basic blocks of competencies. Blocks of core competencies are indexed relative to each other by different weights assigned to them. This allows you to highlight the main thing in the activities of the employee, as well as to enter into a comparative accounting of the effectiveness, usefulness of the activities of employees in different departments.

Some employees can be compared with others, as well as with point standards for matching a position, category across a holding or division, since each employee in the certification process gains a certain total number of points.

6. Each level of development of a separate competence within the basic block of competencies and, if necessary, the entire given basic block is assigned its own score (for example, from 1 to 5), which is then verbally described in detail as a rank or standard for performing activities. When describing performance standards, depending on the need, other approaches can be applied, in addition to describing competencies: personal and professional qualities, skills, knowledge and their level of development:

■ process requirements - a description of business processes or activity algorithms, or interaction with employees and departments;

■ requirements for the quality of work performance;

■ accounting for quantitative (volumes of work done and (or) commodity, assortment and economic indicators etc.) and temporary indicators of achievements (terms), indicators of labor productivity;

■ taking into account innovations, intra-corporate, intra-divisional and external image consequences of the employee's activities.

7. Further, in addition to being used in attestation, work performance standards find their rightful place in job descriptions, annexes to them, requirements for positions and vacancies, descriptions of categories of employees and other personnel and system-wide documents.

If they are already registered, the preparation of personnel certification is greatly simplified.

Stages of creating work performance standards, which should be tied to positions and jobs.

1. Identification of general (detailed list or specific competencies for the organization as a whole) competencies of the employees of the organization.

1. Highlighting key competencies for employees of a certain type and level. For example, for all warehouse employees and managers of a certain level.
   1. If necessary, endowing competencies with weighting values.
   2. Description of the reference levels of work performance for each key competency, indicator, parameter), criterion at specific workplaces or for typical positions - creating standards for work performance, customer service for groups of employees, a specific category of employees, etc.

The following criteria for assessing the success of an employee, the so-called digital standard:

"1" - initial level (unsatisfactory);

"2" - below the required level;

"3" - quite satisfies (middle level) - the standard for the position;

"4" - better than average;

"5" - exceeds expectations.

(Attention is primarily drawn to extreme values ​​- "zones of risk" due to clear non-compliance or increased compliance. - Note auth.)

When determining level reference Behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS) are used, which combine rating and descriptive methods. The employee is evaluated by the manager in terms of the compliance of his behavior with pre-selected scale behavioral values ​​(how to, how not to). If this methodology is converted into a test, then employees themselves can evaluate themselves. If the test is “open” to the employee, then the methodology is already a self-learning tool.

A customer-centricity score might look like this:

■ an employee may ignore a waiting client if he/she believes that he/she is not promising;

■ spends as much time with the client as necessary, additionally consults the client by phone and e-mailmail;

t may refuse to consult a client if he does not have the necessary information;

■ perceives an irritated client as a natural phenomenon, calmly and respectfully works with him;

and in the absence necessary knowledge gets them selfbut also uses in his work;

■ makes fair remarks to the client if he is annoyed. (Correct choices are in italics. — Note auth.)

The principles of client-orientation can otherwise be called a manifestation of "team" in relation to the client (client— part of the businessfamilies, a member of our team) and the ideological basis for the development of service standards.

Table 3 shows an example of assigning criteria with different weights, based on expert assessments of the importance for the successful operation of a particular criterion.

Table 3. Evaluation of an employee using the rating method and the allocation of weight components of the evaluation criteria (coefficients)

	Evaluation criterion, competence	Specific gravity (coefficient)	Points	Final grade, in points
	Execution speed, performance			3×4= 12
	Appearance
	Discipline, presence in the workplace
	Communication skills within the team (support for team spirit)
	Communication with external agents
Sum of points by significant criteria: 24
Sum of points for secondary criteria: 6
Overall final score of 30 (for comparison with other operators)

Note. The key, most significant evaluation criteria are highlighted in italics. According to them, a comparison of this employee with others or with a point standard of compliance is carried out.

In the table above, three key assessment parameters are marked in italics. They are the most significant. According to them, first of all, one can judge the suitability of a specialist by comparing it with other employees or with a point standard of compliance.

The score standard of compliance is accepted in advance. It may not be lower than any certain sum of points for significant (key) criteria or the overall final score, etc.

The total final score is equal to the sum of the scores according to the criteria, multiplied in advance by the specific weights (coefficients).

The norm is when 70-80% of employees meet the specified success criteria. The remaining employees are divided approximately equally: below and above the bar of the specified criteria. If an employee is 30% above the set standards, then it is necessary to think about transferring him to a higher position or expanding his powers. With those whose performance is below the bar of specified criteria or standards, you need to do the opposite.

In order to combine numerous terminological and practical differences in approaches to the allocation and use of competencies for personnel assessment at the semantic level, we will create a simple sequence of “dependencies”.

■ In order for a person to be able to make a clay pot (for example, a hotel claims to be original and uses such pots as free souvenirs for guests), he needs to understand his mentor, have a certain natural skill and desire (motivation), take a course of study (gain useful experience in required volume). Then he will have the necessary knowledge of a practical and theoretical nature - he will be competent.

■ In order for us to hire him, we need to find out if he wants to work for us and in this direction further, what is the motivation (to determine the nature and duration of possible relationships, methods of control and motivation), whether he lost his labor skills and communication skills while he was not working.

How to start highlighting core competencies? From the analysis of the content of work in relation to the main business function of the organization.

1. Analysis of the work of everything vending machine and harmonizing the responsibilities of all workers, as well as determining how all jobs are interconnected.

1. Selection of certain jobs for analysis.
   1. Collecting the necessary information by observing the actual work of employees, interviewing people in the workplace, and interviewing employees using questionnaires” 1 .

1 Fatrell C. Sales management. - St. Petersburg: Neva, 2004. - S. 220.

Based on the analysis of the content of the work, many important documents can be drawn up:

■ list of key and additional competencies, requirement of standards;

■ job description, qualification requirements and etc.

Identification of key competencies and other evaluation criteria

Recruitment agency "For family reasons", Moscow. The main business function is to connect qualified personnel with worthy parents and children. Mission: the best tutors and nannies for the active personal development of children. Competitive advantage: really high-quality personnel, real terms of selection, verification of proposed employees.

The agent’s work (main actions, functions) to connect the two partner parties consists in interviewing nannies and tutors, assessing their personal and professional capabilities, maintaining databases on a PC, finding out the needs of parents and children, introducing the parties to each other, concluding agreements of mutual obligations , tracking the success of the work of employees in families, participation in solving difficult situations.

Based on all the above information, key comptendencies employees will:

■ insight (understanding people);

■ ability to conduct multi-stage negotiations (personally and by phone);

■ sociability and natural goodwill;

■ analytical ability to make accurate calculations;

■ self-organization and organization of time;

■ ability to work in a team.

These formulations are understandable to all employees of the recruitment agency without summing up the scientific base - at the level of a common language of communication.

Additional qualities: excellent memory for events and faces, conflict resolution skills.

Additional requirements: own successful experience in working with children and adolescents as a nanny, tutor, teacher and psychologist; natural inclination to work with children - love for children, commitment to family values; good physical health.

Special requirements: high speed printing on a PC, good attention span, knowledge of the basics of drafting service contracts.

You can see that the key competencies smoothly flowed into additional requirements, etc. This once again emphasizes that these competencies are key, but not the only ones of their kind. The secret is that the properties of our attention and memory force us to resort to various kinds of structuring, because there is no way to immediately cover the list of 40 mandatory items. But this does not mean that the approach to identifying key competencies is random and temporary. On the contrary, it is quite natural: first we single out the main thing, then that without which the main thing would not make sense, and finally, the desirable. (See the section on drafting an application and other sections.)

But that's not all, we can add some personal qualities and characteristics to the above evaluation criteria.

C. Fattrell in the book already mentioned above gives an even more classical approach, historically and logically preceding the above, namely, qualification requirements.

“Most sales managers define the following minimum required characteristics of a sales agent.

1. Intelligence is the mental ability necessary to perform tasks of a high level of complexity.
2. Education - graduation educational institution with above average performance.
3. A strong personality is a focus on achieving success, self-confidence, initiative, a positive outlook on life, a sense of tact, maturity, and having a ready-made realistic plan for moving up the career ladder.

4. Experience - doing your job diligently, going beyond the simple official duties; if a person has just finished his studies, then his active participation in the activity educational organizations and above-average project development.

1. Physical Data - Creation good first impressions, pleasant appearance, neat clothes and good physical shape.

1 Fatrell C. Sales management. - St. Petersburg: Neva, 2004. - S. 222.

Why can Western society afford such high standards in relation to a seemingly ordinary commercial agent, while we in Russia cannot? This will become possible when we pay the worthy really worthy. These are clearly not enough. As a result of improper upbringing with threats and intimidation, our children do not develop properly logical abilities, the ability to think independently and the desire for the comprehensive development of the personality is lost, lack of will is formed, namely the will and a very strong desire to achieve the goals that distinguish the leader * and any successful person. Thus, for a seller in the service sector, it will be of particular importance have developed logical abilities in a harmonious combination and with the development of figurative, sensual, sensual (right hemisphere thinking) plus its volitional qualities in achieving goals and the ability to convince yourself and others. Appendix 9 gives a simple but very effective test for determining the nature of thinking in others and in oneself. It can also be used as a self-understanding test by guessing, without using a key, which of the three questions in each item refers to one or another style of learning and thinking: right hemisphere, left hemisphere or equal hemisphere.

Before doing more complex tests (multivariate, multimodal), evaluate yourself and others on this simple and forgotten: is your employee, applicant more process (right brain) or result (left brain) oriented, or is he a mixed type? Required for various activities different people: some concentrate on the details, missing the main thing, others, seeing the main thing, forget about the specifics.

This test does not measure the level of personality development, even if it turns out that the person being tested is equal hemispheric, this requires a separate conversation. The test can be used for training in building compact questionnaires that are used to quickly evaluate someone. 10-15 questions followed by a discussion of the selected answers, a few questions from a standard structured interview - and you already understand how a person will build his strategy for achieving goals, how he will process information, what he wants to achieve, what is his map of ideas about work, etc. .

There are only three factors in the test, and therefore, you can quite easily understand the reality behind the three psychological directions of the questions: left-brain processing of information and the way to achieve the goal, right-brain, mixed. If you are lucky “through the prism of the test”, you will see an image, a model of a developed, integrated personality, who thinks logically and figuratively well, with well-formed analytical and intuitive capabilities, who feels good both in the process of work and in time pressure to achieve business goals.

Do not rush to use the key to the test. Sort the answers yourself and only then compare with the key - and you will have the opportunity to start a career as a psychodiagnostic, if you have not started it yet. In this regard, we quote from an excellent book that can be recommended as a rite of passage into professional psychodiagnostics.

“With a correct approach to the development and interpretation of multivariate test questionnaires, it is necessary to take into account the following psychometric maxim: it is possible (with more or less difficulty) to come up with such a question (and, therefore, a lot of questions) that, in a multivariate analysis of the matrix, will give a vector passing in the vicinity of any a predetermined point of the multidimensional space of features. It follows from this that any locus of trait space (including a sparse one, which does not give a grouping of items on this particular list, does not give a scale) can be filled with a group of correlated questions and get a new scale that measures something intermediate to what the questionnaire measured. in its original version.

The choice of one or another system of scales (features) is largely determined by the developer's intention or the initial list that he has at his disposal" 1 .

As a result of the above considerations, some “corrective touches” are still added to other criteria for evaluating employees of the “For family reasons” recruitment agency, since the previously identified key competencies are the result of these qualities and personality traits: strong will, development of logicalabilities and figurative-sensory thinking(sensual, emotional intelligence).

Term "key competencies" became widely known after the publication of the works of G. Hamel and K. Prahalad. They give it two definitions.

The first is “the skills and abilities that enable a company to deliver fundamental benefits to consumers.”

The second is a set of skills and technologies, the knowledge and experience accumulated by the organization, which become the basis for successful competition.

The competence of the company appears as a result long work, careful selection of personnel, the accumulation of the necessary knowledge and skills, the organization of collective work to achieve high productivity.

When all these indicators reach a sufficiently high degree, we can say that the company has moved to a higher level of quality, because. at the same cost, knowledge and experience have been transformed into true competence, turned into a competitive opportunity that consumers have noticed.

Features of key competencies

A specific key competency is always individual, because is present only within the framework of one business system with its own individual set of resources and abilities.

Key competencies for the company can be:

Knowledge of the needs of the market and the ability to regularly receive this knowledge;

The ability to put into practice the proposals required by the market;

The ability to continuously build and develop their core competencies.

Key competencies are created through good management labor resources, knowledge bases and intellectual capital, as well as through the coordination and unification of the efforts of working groups, departments and external partners. At the same time, the competencies of the company must be flexible to ensure compliance with any market requirements.

Competitive advantage

Today, most companies have standard competencies, so they cannot become a guarantee of successful activity.

For successful competition, it is necessary to formulate a key unique competence that will allow the company, firstly, to solve problems that are inaccessible to most other market players, and secondly, to set a new standard of activity in the industry and thereby ensure competitive advantage.

Competitive advantage is understood as a set of company characteristics that allow, at lower costs than competitors, to produce goods that are of greater value to the consumer. There are many ways to achieve a competitive advantage, including offering quality products or services at low prices, high quality goods at high prices, goods with optimal combination prices, quality, consumer properties, level of service, etc.

Factors that form a competitive advantage

Factors capable of providing a competitive advantage are divided into internal and external.

Internals include:

scale effect;
- experience effect;
- concentration effect;
- the effect of resource-saving technologies;
- synergy effect;
- effect of vertical integration.

The external ones are:

Improving the components of the value chain according to Porter;
- improvement of market segmentation;
- improvement of the components of the extended product concept.

Benefits of core competencies

A core competency has the following benefits:

Significant for consumers who are willing to pay for the competency as for the bulk of the acquired value;
- able to change and adapt to new market requirements;
- unique, it is unlikely that competitors will be able to repeat it;
- based on knowledge, not on coincidence;
- linked to several activities or products;
- relevant, because corresponds to the strategic aspirations of the market and the company;
- provides an opportunity for partnership to create a new core competency;
- clarity and accessibility of the wording of the competence allows for an unambiguous interpretation.

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Efremov V.S., Khanykov I.A.

The history of the development of economic systems has known several revolutions, and we are now entering one of them. The new era is called differently, they talk about new technologies and methods of management. Never before has the task of finding a competitive advantage been so acute - the very concept of hypercompetition speaks of the increasing dynamism of competitive relations. It became clear that the competitive advantage of the near future is knowledge and information. But how to identify this resource, how to develop and use it? How is the system of strategic planning and management changing? How applicable are the existing methods of analysis, what approaches can be determined to develop them and form new ones?

Economists are accustomed to thinking in terms of such categories as economic activity and an economic entity, understanding the latter as an organization, that is, a form of collective expedient activity of individuals. At the same time, we traditionally recognize the presence of a kind of "new quality" in the organization, which is expressed in the disidentification of the organization itself from the people who make it up, and understanding it as a new independent entity, the nature of which lies in understanding the essence of the synergy of the elements of the built structure.

The most important goals of the existence of any organization are continuity (non-cessation) of activities and progressive development. For a commercial organization, the third most important goal is to obtain economic benefits or commercial effect. Understanding strategy as “a course of action that determines a certain and stable line of behavior of an organization over a sufficiently long historical interval”, commercial organization, operating in a competitive environment, sets itself the main task of ensuring a sustainable competitive advantage, the operation of which will be the key to the long-term and effective existence and development of the organization.

It was the task of finding the basis of such a competitive advantage that determined the selection strategic management from the general science of management, which is attributed to the mid-50s of the last century.

Relatively low rates of environmental change, limited information and access to discretely distributed factors - natural resources, new needs and markets, cheap labor and capital, new technologies, etc. - placed among critical tasks the most complete analysis of the external environment, forecasting its changes and designing the organization in the best (in terms of efficiency) compliance with it.

Under these conditions, the so-called "planning school" developed. She used sophisticated long-term forecasting and planning tools to develop a strategy that would allow the company to match internal parameters with external variables as closely as possible and thus gain a competitive advantage. This is the so-called "prescriptive" approach to the formation of a long-term strategic plan, which depends to a large extent on the representativeness, consistency, homogeneity, comparability and accuracy of the data used in the calculations.

The expansion of organizations in the 1960s led to increased pressure on organizations from the external environment. The variability of external factors has reached a point above which adaptation to it by the method of changing the original plan is simply ineffective. Then it was noted that many "small" decisions that the organization constantly makes in accordance with external and internal conditions form a certain course of action, which is the strategy, by the reflexive method of "trial and error". This approach has been called "logical incrementalism". Among the main criticisms - insufficient attention to rational goal-setting by managers, the possible lag in the pace of "learning" of the organization from the dynamics of changes in the external environment, the too high cost of the "trial and error" method.

Further growth of organizations based on diversification, capitalization of economies of scale in terms of mass marketing and global demand was based on portfolio planning models. However, the macroeconomic instability of the 70s (oil crisis, rising interest rates, etc.), which revealed the imperfection of the existing long-term forecasting methods and their unacceptability in an unstable environment, contributed to the discrediting of these models.

Further development of models strategic analysis was based not on long-term forecasting, but on competition analysis and strategic positioning. The process of strategy formation was now driven by factors that were previously not taken into account at all in strategic analysis, such as, for example, the size of the company and the number of competitors. This made it possible to theoretically substantiate the receipt and use of a competitive advantage due to the correct positioning of the company in an attractive industry. Among the shortcomings of these approaches, static analysis was noted, excessive attention to the environment of the organization, and not to its internal abilities; to competition, but not cooperation.

Thus, it can be seen that the development of schools of strategic management followed the changes that took place in the environment, which affected both the productive forces of society and, consequently, the factors of competitive advantages, and the very essence of competitive relations - that is, such development itself occurred in accordance with "reflexive" model.

Therefore, today the relevance of a new look at strategic analysis has become especially apparent as a result of new fundamental changes in the environment, entailing a change in the entire philosophy of business, one of the names of which is globalization.

The wide availability of resources has made it impossible to gain a competitive advantage in exploiting the external conditions of the business. The strengthening of interpenetration and interdependence of the economies of developed and developing countries (in any combination) is noticeable to the naked eye not only in trade, but also, more importantly, in the balance of payments in general - markets have become international not only for goods, but also for production factors. The international specialization of labor and the distribution of production and technological chains and, as a result, the creation of a global mechanism for the formation of use value contribute to the further unification of business and politics.

A single global capital market, the result of the gradual consolidation of national trading floors, in which there is less and less opportunity for direct arbitrage, makes everyone a hostage to events on the other side of the globe. Thus, the task of monitoring the environment, which is necessary for the preparation of strategic plans based on the methodologies of prescription, reflection and strategic positioning, has become much more complicated - all companies in the world operating in similar, adjacent and even different markets, with or without similar experience, can should be considered as potential competitors. The opening of national markets allows them to enter into direct competitive interaction at any time.

The full range of global opportunities is also available, but in a changing environment, organizations have nowhere to “anchor”. The ideology of analyzing the environment, competitors, predicting its changes and the dynamics of the conjuncture and, based on the data obtained, building an organization to extract the commercial effect from the use of opportunities is finally losing its relevance. Therefore, in search of a competitive advantage, organizations are increasingly looking inward, trying to identify in themselves those capabilities around which it will be possible to build a business space. Models of such analysis and planning have been developed by the school of resources, abilities and competencies for more than 10 years.

The urgency of the very formulation of such a problem is already due to the fact that the classical schools of strategic planning are not able to explain the existence of some business phenomena of the 90s. For example, Wal-Mart over the past twenty years has shown twice the profitability of its competitors; the profit of the American airline Soutwest Airlines showed a steady upward trend, while the losses of the entire industry as a whole amounted to about 10 billion US dollars (from 1990 to 1993); Nucor Steel shares rose steadily in value throughout the 80s and 90s, while the values ​​of most steel producers either stabilized or fell. All three listed companies operate in traditional sectors of the economy in a mature market and, at the same time, were able, apparently due to the development of internal factors, to take a leading position. The tasks of identifying and using such factors are reflected in the development of resource-oriented strategic analysis and management, which have become an incubator of ideas about competencies and abilities.

Note that the disadvantage new school strategies - comprehensive, but removable, is a relatively young age, which is the reason for the underdevelopment of analytical models. As will be shown below, modern discussions between its followers do not go beyond the conceptual and terminological apparatus and general concepts, as well as only approaches to the formation of an analysis methodology. It is believed that the further development of the new school of strategy will resolve this problem, in particular, an attempt will be made below to present some ideas for filling the methodological vacuum.

Further, it is often noted that the analysis of the internal parameters of the organization underestimates the importance of the environment in the formation of competitive advantage. Below we will demonstrate the inconsistency of such remarks, at least in relation to some works in this area.

Before the history of the development of this direction of strategic analysis and management will be presented, it is important to mention that some authors note the emergence of the fifth school. Conditioned by the new realities of post-industrialism in industrialized countries, this school does not rely on competition, but on cooperation as the basis for the existence, development and prosperity of business. At the same time, the most effective organization Such cooperation between competitors is built precisely on the complementarity of the abilities and competencies of the participating organizations. Therefore, it is especially important to learn how to define competencies and abilities in order to achieve their optimal configuration within the partnership or alliance being created.

Historically, in the literature, various terms are used interchangeably to refer to similar concepts - strengths, skills, competencies, abilities, organizational knowledge, invisible assets. Kenneth Andrews, for example, uses the term "distinctive competence" to define the kind of activity in which an organization excels. Prahalad and Hamel, in what became a seminal work that largely determined the further development of this school of strategic management, use the term “core competence” to refer to a set of skills and technologies, a mass of knowledge and experience haphazardly accumulated by an organization, which becomes the basis of successful competition. . In order to emphasize the importance of "collective company learning", some works use the term "capacity" or "key capability" to refer to the specific dynamics of learning processes. All these terms are similar in that they refer to the unique abilities, knowledge, and established behavior patterns of an organization that are a potential source of its competitive advantage.

In fact, the idea that an organization's internal capabilities are an important component of competitive advantage is not new in itself and can be found in the early writings of the prescriptive school.

In 1957, with his book Leadership in Administration, Selznick was one of the first authors to point out that internal factors organizations, such as human resources or experience, determine the likelihood of success in implementing a policy. Claiming that in business the past determines the present, namely that in the course of its development the organization develops a certain "character", which he called "distinctive competence", manifested through a number of "special abilities and limitations" contained in the "institutional system that develops over time affecting the organization's ability to formulate and adhere to certain strategies. At the same time, such a distinctive competence, which can be used in one type of activity, can play a restraining role and become “distinctive incompetence” in another, the art of management, according to the author, lies precisely in the ability to form the right opinion regarding the organization’s compliance with its task and strategy. As an example, we consider a company-workshop for the individual production of boats and yachts, whose management decides to start mass production of low-cost high-speed boats. The venture failed because the history and culture of the organization did not match the new challenges. Thus, Selznick concludes, the impact of a company's internal social factors is as important, if not more important, than market conditions.

This conclusion had a serious impact on many works on business strategy in those years, in which they began to emphasize that the development of a strategy and the search for new opportunities are unthinkable without the presence of internal abilities to implement decisions made, or at least the likelihood of their acquisition. Thus, in his book "Corporate Strategy" (Corporate Strategy), Ansoff (Ansoff) offers a template list of skills and resources, the so-called "competence grid", which should be regularly drawn up both for the company itself and for competitors in order to comparative analysis and identifying the relative strength of competitors in a given market. This analytical model made it possible to substantiate strategic decisions especially with regard to business diversification.

A deeper search for opportunities to link organizational capabilities and external factors environment was realized in the concept of extracting a competitive advantage from the correlation of distinctive competencies and existing opportunities described in the works of such famous Harvard Business School authors as Learned, Christensen, Andrews and Guth in the 1960s. A number of their publications have led to the well-known model of strategic analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the company, external opportunities and threats.

In the early 1970s, developments in this area of ​​strategic management slowed down noticeably. One of the reasons for this was the difficulty of practical assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the company. In his study of company capabilities, Stevenson concludes that there is rarely a consensus among managers of the same company about their own strengths and weaknesses, in particular, managers at a higher level in the hierarchy tend to overestimate strengths, while managers middle and lower management are often more pessimistic, and rare methodologies for identifying strengths and weaknesses are based on peer review.

On the other hand, the very foundations of strategic planning were questioned. In 1985, the Harvard Business Review published a publication by Robert Hayes, in which the author severely criticized the practice of strategy development that existed at that time, starting with goal setting, and only then solving the problem of determining how to achieve goals. “Plans should not be made in order to then look for ways to carry them out; instead, it is necessary to build capabilities and promote plans for their use.

Further, in his book Mobilizing Invisible Assets, Hiroyuko Itami also emphasized the need to build on a company's strengths or so-called "invisible assets", which have been defined as company attributes that have the potential to generate profits. but not shown on the balance sheet, such as: reputation, brand name, technical knowledge and experience, customer loyalty. The author emphasized the long-term nature of the source of competitive advantage formed by invisible assets.

Thus, for these authors, strategic analysis inevitably began with a consideration of the company's internal capabilities and resources. This approach was more fully reflected in the development of the resource school of strategic planning and management, which began in the 1980s.

The central theoretical premise for this group of authors was the concept of organization as an interconnection of specialized resources that are used to achieve a privileged position in the market, that is, a sustainable competitive advantage. The development of a company, in this case, is an ongoing process of acquiring, developing and expanding its resource capabilities, and since the course of development of each company is strictly individual, the resources available to companies are different. The strategy of each company, therefore, is formed with the aim of using exactly the set of resources that is available. Thus, the history of the organization, the accumulated experience, character and culture, strengths and abilities - all are factors that influence the formation of the strategy and determine its success.

This concept is applicable both at the level of strategic business units and at the level of corporate governance. At the level of individual business units, competitive advantage is derived from the unique resources and capabilities inherent in the company that cannot be easily copied or acquired by competitors. At the corporate level, bundles of resources and abilities can be used in various types activities to produce a range of final products. Thus, the success of a corporate strategy is based on the accumulation of resources and capabilities and their exploitation in accordance with market conditions in the mode of creating business units.

As a result, the attributes of the company, its capabilities and resources become a more reliable anchor for both business and corporate strategy than changing environmental variables and market demands.

In general, the development strategy of an organization should follow in line with business development "as a way of expedient human activity aimed at obtaining a certain commercial benefit through the creation and implementation of consumer values ​​in demand by society" . Since the systemic function of business is to transform the opportunities existing in the environment to meet social needs in order to obtain a commercial effect, the development of an organization should be based on the realization of the possibilities for forming its functional utility in the macrocosm.

The very existence of an organization is due to the demand for its function in the macrocosm. However, this function can be understood and evaluated only by representing the organization as an element of a macrosystem. From these positions, the tectocentric paradigm of classical theories of strategic planning, which asserts the importance of preserving the organization as a form of expedient collective activity of people, ceases to meet the challenges facing modern management theorists and practitioners.

Despite the complexity of the internal structure of a modern organization, its survival is not associated with the preservation of the established order, but with the implementation and development of the system function, since "not every order is creative, but only the one that is expedient" . To separate the strategic issues of the existence and development of the organization, it is advisable to introduce the concept of a business system, which is a special "system of relations within the organization, in its external environment, in the industry and in the market." Introduction of the concept of a business system and its use along with the concept economic system forces to shift analytical accents. If the goal and criterion for the effectiveness of the functioning of the economic system is the satisfaction of social needs through the processes of production, distribution, exchange and consumption of material goods, then the goal of the business system is to obtain a commercial effect. And the satisfaction of social needs is only a means, but not a goal, and it is from these positions that the same processes of production, distribution, exchange and consumption of material goods are considered in the business system.

Generally speaking, a business system can also unite several organizations, insofar as the activity of each individual organization will fit into the execution logic and be an element of the system function of the entire business in the context of the business system. It becomes clear that in this case it becomes impractical to analyze the environment of each individual organization, because the focus is shifting towards the environment of the entire business system as a whole, that is, the business space. The business space model is shown in fig. one.

Rice. 1. Business space model

For the purposes of further development of the methodology in this article, we will assume that the boundaries of the business system coincide with the boundaries of the organization, that is, that a separate organization is the carrier of the business system function. The issues of interorganizational cooperation within the business system, the problems of integrating consumer value chains are not taken out by chance: the basic tones will lay the foundation for a functional analysis of the business system, which, as it becomes more complex, will only acquire new projections, acquiring analytical models, the rules for constructing which and are offered below.

The content of the function of the organization and the effectiveness of its implementation are laid down in the internal conditions of the organization, which are a combination of production, technological, financial, economic, socio-cultural, organizational, technical and administrative conditions. Simulation of internal conditions lays the fundamental basis for further analysis. Together with external conditions (economic, political and legal, sociocultural, technological), they determine the set of resources available to the organization, as well as the form and content of its business processes, which result in a product that satisfies social needs (see Fig. 2).

Rice. 2. Internal conditions of the organization

Classification of resources takes place on a qualitative basis. Allocate financial, physical, human and organizational resources. Financial resources include own and borrowed capital, retained earnings; physical resources include fixed assets: movable and real estate, buildings and structures, machinery and equipment; human resources are made up of knowledge, experience, qualifications, the ability to make judgments and take risks; organizational resources are not only history, reputation, established relationships, trust, but also internal organizational culture.

To refer to business processes, we also propose to use the term "capabilities". Business process modeling is an independent branch of management science, the methods of which are largely borrowed from systems for designing production plants. Visually, a business process can be represented as a certain procedure, the organization and management of which, with the involvement of the necessary resources, makes it possible to obtain a certain result from the original object (see, for example, Fig. 3).

A business process, in the structural view, can have an unlimited number of attachments. It is easy to see that at the highest level of abstraction, this model reflects the system function of the business system as a whole. Increasing the detail logically leads to elementary indivisible works. "Ability" can be called a business process of any level. The semantic content of the concept of “ability”, which has developed in the schools of strategic planning, does not contradict the understanding of it as a business process. At the same time, the proposed identification allows us to use for the purposes of this analysis the widest range of existing tools for modeling an organization and business processes.

Rice. 3. Information representation of the business process

The organization thus has a large number of capabilities, the classification of which becomes a separate task. To simplify this task, you can use the business process classification model proposed by the American Quality Association (see Figure 4). In accordance with this classification, all business processes are either functional, that is, they directly form the content of the business system and the procedures for performing its function, or structural, that is, aimed at maintaining and developing the infrastructure of the business system, ensuring its own existence as such.

As a result of the serial-parallel execution of business processes (capacities) that make up a business system built in a certain way, the opportunities that exist in the business space are used to meet existing needs. It is the knowledge of how to deploy, organize and manage such a system and its elements that constitute “competencies” (Fig. 2).

Rice. 4. Classification of business processes

In general, the concept of "competence" can have two meanings: 1) the scope of powers granted by law, charter or other act to a particular body or official, and 2) knowledge, experience in a particular area. On the basis of the second basic meaning, we give the definition that "competence" is a special property of an information resource containing experience, knowledge and skills about the way of organizing and managing resources and business processes (organization's capabilities) to achieve the set goals, the bearer of which individually or collectively are workers. Competences also have a hierarchy in accordance with the hierarchy of abilities and the priority of the resources under their "management".

Using the capabilities of the organization leads to the addition of a certain share of use value to the final product, which appears as a result of their organized interaction. In general, business as a whole can be represented as a process of production of use values, as a sequence of consumption of some use values ​​acquired on the supplier market, their transformation and the addition of new use value, followed by the realization in society of the final use value, wrapped in a product. It is the "interface" of the product that allows the internal capabilities of the business system to be perceived by the consumer (see Figure 5).

Rice. 5. The structure of the product as a market offer of the company

Competences, in turn, as some kind of internal knowledge, are inaccessible to the direct perception of the consumer, as, however, according to the results of research, and the managers themselves. They find indirect expression in the use value of the final product through the efficiency of the use of abilities and resources in production and organizational system with a specific configuration.

A key competence is a higher-order competence involved in creating the greatest use value, which is a collective knowledge that allows organizing and managing the use of other competencies and abilities, thereby creating additional use value.

It is the complementarity of the use value created by the core competence that reveals its synergistic nature (see Fig. 6). At the same time, existing practically outside the dimensions of capabilities and products, core competencies are not derived from the needs of the market - being somewhat universal, it is able to provide access (to be a "key") to a number of markets that can be very different from each other.

Such properties of core competencies are noted by Praalad and Hamel. Literally, they wrote that “a core competency has three main properties: ... firstly, it gives potential access to a wide range of markets, secondly, it adds significant use value to the final product, perceived by the buyer, thirdly, it requires large the cost and effort to copy a competitor's core competency." Various authors have proposed other characteristics of core competencies. So far, eight important properties have been identified.

Rice. 6. Core competency model

First of all, complexity is inherent in a core competency. It is a derivative of the totality of resources and abilities, it is quite difficult to identify it, it is invisible. A specific core competency can only be used within the business system in which it exists, that is, it is inherent only in a given configuration of resources and capabilities. Competence, unlike other organizational assets, does not wear out with use. On the contrary, and a number of authors noted this as the main strategic advantage arising from the formation of a competitive advantage based on competence, it develops, its quality increases, the efficiency of its use increases significantly - this is the most wear-resistant and long-term asset of the organization. At the same time, the key competence is inimitable, that is, it cannot be directly copied or used by competitors, and irreplaceable - it cannot be replaced by another competence. The core competence of the organization, most often, is initially better developed than that of competitors and is customer-oriented (by definition). And, finally, since the core competency includes a set of other competencies and abilities, it can be used to reinforce them.

The key competence lies at the intersection of the internal conditions of the business and consumer preferences, this is the knowledge on the use of which depends on obtaining the maximum share of use value. It is the increase in added use value through the development of key competencies that is the basis for obtaining a sustainable competitive advantage. A higher use value of a product can be used to implement two basic types of strategies - differentiation and cost leadership. This suggests that the core competency gives the opportunity to obtain in the competitive struggle both a qualitative advantage attributable to the properties of the product, and a quantitative advantage attributable to a stronger product. financial position. Further, this returns to the conclusion, voiced earlier, about the universal nature of the key competence, which makes it possible for its manifestation in the consumer and industrial markets.

Postponing this conclusion for later consideration, we note that in this case, the analysis of competencies should also cover the qualitative and quantitative aspects, that is, evaluate not only consumer and market advantages, but also the financial parameters of development along the path of key competence, i.e. in the first approximation, the share of additional costs and profits.

The purpose of the strategic analysis of core competencies is to offer a new basis for the formation of a strategic plan, the execution of which leads to the emergence (maintenance) of a sustainable competitive advantage, as well as to assess the potential of this plan from the standpoint of the financial condition and capabilities of the organization or business system as a whole.

The goal is divided into several tasks. First of all, it is necessary to model internal structure relationships and interdependencies between existing resources, capabilities and competencies inherent in the business system. In general, this is done in the following way.

In the process of modeling the business processes of an organization, the abilities and resources involved in creating a product and their contribution to its final use value are revealed. The qualitative structure of consumer value in terms of the importance and priority for the consumer of the properties of the product perceived by him and the service accompanying the sale are determined in the process of a direct survey. The initial identification of a set of competencies occurs in the process of familiarization with the functioning of the business system and is built by the method peer review in cooperation with management personnel.

It is important to determine which business processes (capabilities) create the maximum share of the consumer value priority for the buyer and what resources are involved in this. From the series of operationally and market-related combinations of abilities and resources ranked in this way, a hierarchy indirectly stands out. existing competencies and, accordingly, the key competence is revealed as organizing and managing the creation of the maximum share of "quality" use value, corresponding to most of the needs.

In the case when the product does not occupy a leading position in the market, and the task is not to accurately identify the existing key competency, but rather to determine the target competency that needs to be acquired from outside or developed within the business system, then, based on the results of analyzing the range of existing offers of competing market offers of various companies, as well as consumer preferences, a hypothetical structure and hierarchy of resources and abilities required to satisfy target market(to reduce costs and time for adaptation based as much as possible on the existing structure), and target competencies and key competencies are defined.

Technically, the task of performing this kind of "counter" analysis is solved by sequentially filling a set of relational matrices with secondary data obtained as a result of analyzing primary information and obtaining results on synthetic matrices. Therefore, to carry out this stage of work, an appropriate material and technical base of informatization tools is required, consisting of standard hardware and original software product. In the cells of the matrices, the degree of dependence or strength of the control vectors between the abilities, resources and competencies of the organization is sequentially put down, so the key to building a software tool is the mathematical apparatus for converting the corresponding analytical coefficients into integral synthetic indicators.

The results of this stage of the analysis is a reference hierarchy of competencies (existing and target) with an indication for each required degree of development and involvement in the management process.

Based on this information, already at the second stage, an action plan is directly formed, the financial parameters of which are calculated based on necessary costs on the formation or reorganization of a base of competencies, abilities and resources and an increase in incoming financial flows, predicted as a result of an increase in market share by target segment, which has a set of needs identified in the early stages of the analysis. This stage of formation of the strategic plan is carried out by general methods, widely covered in the literature, and therefore is not included in the problem area of ​​this article.

The sequence of strategic planning based on the key competencies of the organization, described earlier, is summarized in fig. 7.

Rice. 7. General scheme analysis of key competencies

Strategic planning is based on the results of ranking the organization's competencies, carried out in accordance with the external and internal conditions of the business system. That is, strategic goal-setting, in accordance with the logic of the school of competencies, becomes a derivative of the existing competencies.

Taking as the basis for the definition of the “key competence” of an organization the characterization given to this phenomenon by Praalad and Hamel, we can conclude that the core competencies should include those that contain most of the properties of goods and services produced by the organization (see Fig. 8).

Rice. 8 Core competencies as a source of the largest number and variety of properties of goods and services

Therefore, among the entire set of competencies under consideration, organizations will differ from non-key competencies precisely in the degree (that is, the number and strength) of the closure of the properties of goods and services to them.

Competences are derived from the capabilities of the organization. Capabilities are mediated by the resources at the disposal of the organization. Required Resources determined by the consumer properties of goods and services.

Thus, an analytical chain is built, shown in Fig. 9:

Rice. 9. The sequence of analysis of key competencies

As an example, the analysis of key competencies was carried out for Forte-IT, which develops and implements computer telephony systems based on Dialogic hardware.

In general, computer telephony systems can be described as service applications based on the integration of a telephone line and a computer, allowing in a certain way to process incoming telephone calls using a computer. Based on computer telephony technologies, products such as Information Systems, voicemail, call forwarding, auto attendant, public address systems, remote voting, telelotteries, automated billing for the use of a communication channel, etc.

The company offers a wide range of solutions for both telecom operators and corporate clients. The product is a software and hardware complex, which, as a rule, is formed on a turnkey basis and is either transferred to the client (in the case of a corporate order, small and medium-sized systems), or installation services are provided by the company's specialists at the client (telecom operator, large projects) as in a stand-alone form, and in integration with other existing systems.

After delivery, the customer is provided with after-sales service for the system for warranty period, and also, already on a contractual basis, services are provided for scaling and expanding the functionality of systems.

It is immediately necessary to make a reservation that systems for corporate clients have low added value and high unit transaction costs. Such systems are considered as a necessary product for presence in this market, but this segment is not targeted for the company. Thus, the task of the analysis was focused on determining the key competencies of Forte-IT as the basis for strategic planning of an existing business for the production and implementation of computer telephony systems for telecom operators.

At present, the following product line has been developed for telecom operators, presented in Table. one.

For completeness of information about the company's product line, it should be noted that all systems of corporate clients are built on the IntelleScript platform, where it is possible to form any computer telephony application in accordance with the client's requirements for functionality: the solution of interest to the client is formed from existing functional blocks.

Table 1
Product line for telecom operators

In general, for each type of application, there are, in principle, two solutions - purely hardware and software and hardware. There are such giants on the hardware solutions market as AT&T, Ericsson, Motorola, etc. These are, one might say, traditional solutions - systems of a closed architecture and high cost, several times, sometimes more than several orders of magnitude, higher than the cost of software and hardware systems.

The latter - the achievements of modern computer technology - exist in the form of an IBM-compatible computer ("regular" or industrial equipment), Dialogic computer telephony board and software. The cost of such systems is much lower, the implementation time is reduced, due to the use of boards from one manufacturer, standards are unified, at the same time, due to the use of a software complex, increased requirements are placed on the fault tolerance of systems, especially in the areas of telecom operators providing paid services.

During a series of interviews both with the company's employees and with representatives of its clients, the main primary requirements for the properties of the company's products were identified and their two-level detailing was made. The results are presented in table. 2. In what follows, this detailed structure of use-value commercial offer company allows you to understand what internal components and in what proportions the final property of the product, perceived by the consumer, is formed, what abilities, resources and competencies and to what extent are involved in the production of these components, which will help to more accurately focus the activities of the strategic plan.

table 2
Identification of consumer properties of products and the structure of consumer value

Using the method of multivariate comparative analysis, the primary properties were ranked in order of importance for telecom operators. This method allows you to rank a set of factors, each of which cannot be directly quantified. The human brain, as a rule, is not able to draw an unambiguous conclusion about the relative importance of more than three or four non-quantitative factors at the same time. Therefore, to solve such a problem, a method is used that is based on estimating the full set of combinations of two factors (see Fig. 10).

In the matrix for comparing combinations of two factors (Fig. 10), the most important one is marked (the assessment is made by an expert method), then it is calculated how many “points” each factor scored and, in accordance with the estimates obtained, a hierarchy of factors is formed according to the degree of importance: the higher the score , the more important the property. If several factors score the same number of points, then their ranking is made in accordance with the initial expert opinion on their importance, marked in the matrix.

The results of such a ranking of the properties of Forte-IT products are shown in fig. eleven.

At the same time, work was carried out to analyze the internal conditions of the business, identify the company's resources, abilities and competencies (see the list and description in Fig. 12). The relationship between them was assessed for three groups of paired relationships:

• 1 group- relations (properties, resources);
• 2 group- relationships (resources, abilities);
• 3 group- relationships (ability, competencies).

If through X = (x1, x2, x3, ... , xn) define a set of properties of goods and services, through Y = (y1, y2, y3, ..., ym)- lots of resources Z = (z1, z2, z3, ..., zk)- many abilities, and through C = (c1, c2, c3, ..., cl)- a set of competencies, then the established groups of relations can be specified by matrices, respectively, (XY), (YZ), (ZC).

For the example under consideration with the Forte IT company, specific relationships will be specified by the matrices shown in Fig. 13 (the arrows show the vectors of influence, the cells of the matrix contain quantitative estimates of the degree of influence on a five-point scale). In the matrix part (YZ) the degree of involvement of the resource in the execution of the process and, accordingly, the dependence of the quality level of the ability on a particular resource is indicated. Similarly at the bottom of the matrix (ZC) the degree of dependence (“controllability”) of abilities on each competence identified by the expert method is indicated. attitude (XY) the degree of "introduction" of each resource in the individual properties of the product is shown, and, accordingly, the degree of dependence of the properties on the quality of the corresponding resources.

Rice. 10. Multivariate Benchmarking Form

To determine how the properties of Forte IT products and services are related to its competencies, i.e. to obtain the relation (XC), we will carry out a sequential closure of the relation (XY) on the attitude (ZC) using a simple compositional rule. But before we formulate it, we note that each element z is defined by the same element x differently, depending on how the element behaves in this case y. In other words, building relationships (XZ) based on relationships (XY) and (YZ), it is necessary to compare how the properties of goods and services are determined by various resources, and resources, in turn, participate in the realization of the company's capabilities. Thus, the most accurate quantification the effectiveness of the influence of a particular ability on the formation of each product property can be obtained by calculating the weighted average of the degree of involvement of resources in the implementation of this ability, weighted by the degree of "introduction" of these resources in each specific product property.

That is, the composition rule looks like this:

(1)

The ratio obtained using this composition rule (XZ) characterized by the corresponding matrix (Fig. 14, values ​​are rounded to integers).

The composition rule (1) is similarly applied to find the closure of the relation just obtained (XZ) on the attitude (ZC) and relationship definitions (XC)(Figure 15, values ​​rounded to whole numbers).

Thus, at this stage of the analysis, data were obtained on how the properties of the product depend on the quality of knowledge, skills and experience, collectively or individually available to the company's employees, that is, on competencies. As previously defined, the highest order competencies are the key ones. the highest degree participating in the formation of the use value of goods and services offered by the company.

Rice. 11. Ranking of product properties in order of importance

At the same time, it is necessary to take into account that each property of the product (element of the structure of use value) carries a different weight for the final consumer. That is, to build a hierarchy of competencies, it is necessary to find the weighted average values ​​in the columns of the relationship matrix (XC), weighted by the hierarchy of requirements for product properties, indicated in Fig. 11, where a lower integral score corresponds to a decrease in the level of the hierarchy of competencies (see the result in Fig. 16).

Rice. 12. Resources, abilities and competencies of the company

Rice. 13. Three groups of relationships between the internal conditions of the business

This last matrix makes it possible to draw an unambiguous conclusion about the key competencies of the organization, while understanding the use value of the product as a set of requirements imposed on it by the hierarchy. These competencies are, in descending order of importance, "organization skills", "people skills" and "special programming".

The data obtained after a detailed acquaintance with the company's activities and the peculiarities of the market for computer telephony systems are not surprising. It is difficult to argue that the ability to organize is key in business in general, and that without certain knowledge and experience in this area, the very appearance of a product is in question. For "Forte-IT" a question of the organization production process is particularly acute - the creation of a product requires both general and special programming skills, individual programmers specialize in specific blocks of the product being created, some of them are not on permanent job, but are involved as necessary in the performance of certain functions. The ability to organize depends on the performance of almost all the capabilities of the company.

Rice. 14. The influence of abilities on the formation of product properties

Rice. 15. The influence of competencies on the formation of product properties

Rice. 16. Hierarchy of competencies

The ability to work with people, the second most important competence, is not only about building an effective team. This competence is also manifested in the training of professional personnel, the development of its own base of competencies for industrial purposes, the exchange of experience and advanced training. The ability to negotiate lucrative contracts relies entirely on this competency. After all, the peculiarity of the computer telephony systems market lies in the almost complete absence of industry or average market price indicators. The same functionality can be obtained by a telecom operator, as noted above, in at least two ways - a hardware solution and a hardware-software solution, moreover, in the category of hardware-software solutions there can be offers from a dozen companies, differences in price between which can reach the same order. At the same time, too low price will not always reflect the lower quality of execution, and often the size of the ambitions of the company's management. Therefore, it is important to be able to predict the range of prices, the lower limit of which will not scare away the buyer with cheapness, the upper limit will not be higher than the budget determined by the buyer for the introduction of a new service.

The two competencies listed above can be called key competencies. It is these competencies that distinguish Forte-IT from competitors, and the competitive advantage of the company certainly depends on the degree of their development.

Finally, only in the third position is competence in special programming. Indeed, this is, in its own way, a “transitional” competence. On the one hand, it directly depends maximum amount functionality of products that in the market of industrial consumers is the basis for the preference of one product over another. However, the level of competition for this competence is reduced, since any company, to one degree or another, can acquire (develop or acquire) the skills of special programming of computer telephony boards. The uniqueness of this competence is already somewhat limited by the unification of standards based on Dialogic boards mentioned above. Therefore, although specialists in this field of programming are less common in the labor market than specialists in general programming, they are not carriers of unique knowledge. In fairness, it should be noted that there are not so many really experienced computer telephony board programmers and they all have jobs in their specialty. Therefore, a newcomer to this market will either have to spend time preparing their own team of programmers, or buy specialists from other companies.

It may come as a surprise that market knowledge is not an important competency. This shows the specifics of this market, namely, the practical absence of any analytical materials, generalized information, statistics, etc. Market knowledge is reduced to information about the activities of competitors and new services of telecom operators in Russia and abroad, which are distributed in the course of personal contacts. Therefore, "the ability to work with people" here more important than knowledge market as such. And finally, the knowledge of economics, finance, and legislation is so common to the entire industry that it cannot even be included in the category of sources of competitive advantage.

When receiving analysis data, forming a strategic plan, they are based on the principle of reverse logic: carriers of key and most important competencies are found, abilities (business processes) and resources that they manage are identified, and further business development is built to maintain and develop precisely these and directly related elements with them.

The resulting picture unambiguously reflects the importance of each competence, and therefore specific managers who are the bearers of this knowledge, performers involved in the implementation of the relevant abilities, and resources that are converted into elements of use value and introduced in a new quality into the final product.

The result of the analysis, therefore, is not only a conclusion about the effectiveness of the current configuration of the business system in terms of creating use value, but also an unambiguous definition of the point of the most efficient application of efforts and resources, structuring and ranking the rest of the field.

Further formation of the strategic plan is based on strengthening the core competencies and related abilities and competencies using both internal (human resources, material and technical base, attraction of financial resources, etc.) and external development methods (strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions). , partnerships). Literature

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