Clients & Cases

The company decided to ask for Iventa’s help because they wanted the evaluation process to be handled with high professionalism and sensitivity – all four product managers were very valuable for the company and, in case none of them were to be promoted to the general manager role, they didn’t wanted to demotivate the team or lose any of their valuable members. Moreover, if after the assessment process none of the internal candidates were suited for the internal promotion, Iventa had to recruit a new general manager for the company and this person had to be accepted, integrated and supported by the old team of product managers.

Also, the company wanted to use this evaluation process to identify the strengths and development needs for each of its product managers and to prepare a development plan for each individual.

Concept & Coordination

We defined together with our client the critical competencies for the product manager role as well as the critical competencies for the general manager role.

We paid special attention to the internal communication process and, together with our client, we prepared a detailed internal communication plan: we discussed and agreed how to communicate to the product managers that they would follow a potential analysis process. Furthemorer we also prepared the message related to the purpose of the assessment and we agreed in details what would be communicated as well as when and by whom (either by us, or by our client) for each stage of the evaluation process.

Based on the requirements discussed and defined together with our client, we prepared a structured competence based interview.

Implementation of the Potential Analysis

Since the participants hadn’t been involved in an assessment process before, each interview started with a preparation session: that meant explaining once again the purpose of the assessment, the process, the expected outcome and the role of the external evaluator. This preparation phase was meant to help the product managers understand the transparency and objectivity of the process.

We conducted the structured competence based interviews with each participant and evaluated their strengths and their development needs for the current role of product manager as well as their potential for the new role of general manager.

Results

The evaluation report for each participant included our feedback after the structured interview, pointing out the strengths of each individual and also including our recommendations of further development for each participant. The evaluation reports have been presented to our client and, based on our reports, the client had an individual feedback discussion with each participant of the evaluation process.

Further we delivered personal feedback to each participant, discussing in details with them all our findings and further recommendations.

Since none of the internal candidates was ready at that moment for taking the general manager role, we had the mission of recruiting an external candidate for this position. The experience of the internal assessment of the product managers team was very useful in our recruitment process because we had the chance to get to know the team that the new general manager had to be integrated as well as to lead effectively. Besides looking for the right technical experience and required personal skills set, we could evaluate the personal match between the new employee and the old team of product managers.