Strategic Human Resources Portfolio - Term Paper Example

? Strategic Human Resources Portfolio Project: Accenture Accenture, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, is a multinational company that primarily provides management and technology consultancy services. Being a multinational company, Accenture provides its services to a hundred and twenty countries amongst them the United States, India, The Philippines, Canada Australia and the Netherlands. Accenture stands out among the largest consultancy firms in the world. It employs a work force of two hundred and fifty-seven thousand employees. India boasts the largest number of people working for Accenture (McMurray, 2005). This number stood at eighty thousand by December 2012. Following India, the United States and the Philippines provide the second and third largest Accenture workforce respectively. Furthermore, the company enlists in the New York Stock Exchange. Despite having its headquarters in Dublin, most of the leading company operations occur in Chicago and New York. The company’s structure sees it organized in three groups that are cross functional. These are work force, operating groups and growth platforms. The workforce comprises of employees offering consultancy services in business management, technology and outsourcing (Herholdt, 2012). The operating group of the organization further sub-divides into five main areas namely: resources, financial services, products, health and communications. Growth platforms are the functional domains the company uses to deliver solutions to their customers. Using this platform, there are three areas that the company focuses on to provide services to their clients. These are technology, business process outsourcing and management consultancies. According to Brewster, Accenture requires talented and highly skilled employees in order for this multinational company to survive in the fierce consultancy business. This makes the human resource strategy of Accenture a cardinal point of focus. A number of environmental and competitive factors stand out as a challenge in the operations of the company. The growing number of consultancy firms in the market poses as a competitive challenge to Accenture. McMurray reports that 20-23% of the work force in the United States operate as consultants, independent contractors and free lancers; therefore, to succeed in a highly competitive business industry, many consultants team up into communities of consultants. These consultants pool their individual resources together in order to have enough resources required to handle bigger consultancy work projects (Banks, 2012). An example is the Phylmar group consultancy network. This group comprises of highly experienced consultants who pool their resources to meet the demands of corporate clients especially those found in fortune 1000 list. Accenture targets corporate clients and, therefore, such groups pose as competition. Moreover, Accenture works towards fostering good relations between the company and the society or environment around them. It fosters policies that maintain a collaborative relationship between its members of staff, and the surrounding community. The skills to succeed program aims to train over five hundred thousand people on entrepreneurial skills (Banks, 2012). This benefits the company in creating a positive brand name and, therefore, a competitive advantage over its competitors. Nonetheless, within a period of two to three years, Accenture projects to face a couple of challenges. The emergence of new technologies and opportunities develop a challenge as the company lacks the necessary skills and manpower to handle the change. Training employees to keep up with new regular trends proves to be costly, especially in large companies like Accenture. This is because they comprise of a large workforce. Secondly, insecurity arising from the challenges of globalization, such as terrorism, stand out as a problem (Herholdt 2012). This is principally because of the company’s diversity in several countries worldwide some of which face these insecurities directly. Therefore, the company’s responsibility of ensuring the safety of its employees gets compromised. In addition, insecurity leads to poor trends in the economy hence a possibility of the company making losses in business. Accenture also projects to face more competition in the future. This is due to the emergence of new players in the consultancy business. In addition, the pooling of resources among consultant professionals to form stronger consultancy groups makes the competition stiffer. Another problem that the company faces are government policies in various countries. Being a multinational company, Accenture seeks to expand and operate in many countries worldwide (Brewster, 2012). However, many government policies are unfriendly to businesses and often regulate the entry and operations of multinational companies. This, in turn, creates poor business environments that do not favor the growth of multinational companies. Finally, the risk of losing their workforce to emerging consultancy companies and organizations pose as a grand challenge. Accenture comprises of highly qualified staff in their respective fields, and other companies put effort in tapping these employees. Furthermore, the strategic plan of Accenture involves five principal steps (Price, 2011). The first step seeks to identify the levels of uncertainty that characterize the operations of the business enterprise. The second step involves defining the identified risks, and the objective of the business organization. In addition, the strategic plan seeks to develop options that the enterprise intends to take to mitigate the risks. Moreover, the plan aims to create a good workforce that is highly skilled to implement the policies the organization has for purposes of mitigating the risks. Finally, the plan targets to ensure that the company stays aligned to the set objectives of achieving its targets. This step seeks to see the company grow and improve in performance. Additionally, the human resource department plays a vital role in the company’s strategic plan. The department exists under the workforce group of the company. Its employees ensure that the internal structures of the organization are competent to ensure that the organization meets its objectives (Sullivan, 2005). Human resource, therefore, has the mandate to hire people who are skilled enough and have qualifications to provide consultancy services in technology, outsourcing and business management. Thus, the human resource plays a crucial role in ensuring achievement of the strategic plan. The human resource department participates in the strategic plan by training employees on new skills in order to keep up with changes in the market (Banks, 2012). This is an essential function because of the dynamism of the customer’s needs especially in relation to technology consultancy. On this basis, the knowledge of technology consultants need to be up to date with the continuous changes in technology occurring today so as to offer the best services to the company’s clients (Price, 2011). Human resources also play a significant role of ensuring employee satisfaction and motivation. Achievement of this occurs by promoting good employer-employee relations. The human resource takes up the task of negotiating better conditions for employees and ensuring employees remain motivated. It is also through this department that employers are able to communicate effectively to employees. Hence, the department plays a role of reconciling employers and employees in a bid to ensure the two teams work together to produce the best output for the company and ensure maximum profits (Price, 2011). The human resource department is not an income-generating group of the company. However, the department incurs high expenses in order to run the office. As a result, Accenture faces the problem of high costs concerning this company. The Human Resource Department of this multinational company is comparatively large. It handles hundreds of thousands of employees in many countries of the world. This leads to the company having to maintain a large human resource department. This becomes a definite struggle for Accenture. The human resource department also faces the challenge of ensuring the skills of employees are up to date and constantly updated. Improving employees skills require that the department to incur costs of constantly holding training programmers for current employees (Price, 2011). To tackle some of the problems the human resource departments faces, a number of recommendations ought to be put forth. The first recommendation suggests that the firm finds alternatives when hiring personnel instead of carrying out the recruitment process. This reduces the need to maintain a large human resource department to carry out recruitment tasks. Instead, the company ought to hire a human resource organization to undertake recruitment processes on behalf of the firm. This is because it is expensive to maintain a human resource department within a consultancy organization (Hayton, 2011). Furthermore, the company’s enormous size makes it more expensive to maintain a human resource department. On this basis, hiring human resource recruitment agencies to hire their staff is a beneficial way of reducing costs. Lastly yet importantly, it grows to be recommendable that the company team up with other consultancy companies in joint ventures. An example is the Phymar consulting group. This allows the company to pool their resources, and those of other companies to undertake tough tasks without increasing a company’s resource in terms of workforce. This reduces the number of workforce the human resource department deals with reducing costs and saving on man power. In addition, this eliminates the proponent need to hire certain professionals. References Banks, T. L. (2012). Corporate compliance and ethics institute, 2012. New York, NY: Practicing Law Institute. Brewster, C. (2012). Handbook of research on comparative human resource management. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Hayton, J. C. (2011). Global human resource management casebook. New York, NY: Rutledge. Herholdt, J. (2012). People management strategy in organizations: articles from Human capital Review. Randburg, South Africa: KnowresPub.. McMurray, S. (2005).Values driven leadership: the history of Accenture. Chantilly, Va.: History. Top of Form Price, A. (2011). Human resource management. Andover: Cengage Learning EMEA. Bottom of Form Read More