Concept: People

People are an essential element of an organisation or enterprise. People are the human elements that carry out activities, make decisions, communicate and collaborate.

People refers to the collection of all persons or individuals associated with an organization. The people may be directly associated with the organization through employment contracts (employee or contractor). Other people may be associated with the organisation through other organisations through contracts or other collaborations.

People bring their mental and physical abilities to the work place. In this Integrated Management System people represent the set of people who have an interest in the organisation. They represent the stakeholders of the organisation.

The stakeholders can be

• Customers
• Employees
• Directors
• Contractors
• Suppliers
• External organisations:
  • Local Government organisations
  • National Government organisations
  • Community organisations
  • Unions

A whole person is the primary element within this concept. A person brings their mental and physical processing capabilities to the work place. In addition, a person has the additional properties that allow an individual to contribute to the organisation:

• Competence: The ability to use skills and knowledge
  • Skills
  • Knowledge
• Experience: gained on various assignments throughout their career
• Personality
  • Attitudes
  • Behaviours
  • Beliefs
  • Values

In Russell Ackoff's system classification categories, a person or individual is a purposeful animate system. As a system, a person or individual has the ability to carry out activities or make decisions. They can also adapt by learning, and changing their ends and means to achieve their objectives and / or goals.

The manger is responsible for developing people either into a new role or within an existing role.

ability to apply knowledge and skills to achieve intended results. <-- ISO 9000:2015

Competencies are demonstrated by people in roles where they use capabilities to produce outcomes. <-- Stephan Haeckel

Core competencies are those essential to the purpose -- it cannot be fulfilled without them. <-- Stephan Haeckel

Competency frameworks provide a way to see the full range of competencies required by an organisation and see their interaction.

A person has the skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours necessary to carry out activities that are part of one or more business processes. A person is generally assigned a one or more roles which are associated with the responsibilities that are to be performed with the various activities. An individuals ability to carry out work is based upon the experiences (a demonstrated ability to do the work from past assignments).

A person has a choice to work for an organisation. This choice is generally agreed through an employment contract. The employment contract is generally based upon a Job Description that outlines the roles and work to be performed by the person.

Various types of employment can be established for the following types of jobs:

• employee
• contractor
• director
• volunteer
• apprentice, trainee, secondment, etc.

The employment contract also covers the compensation and benefits associated with the job.

Where the customers or users forms groups with specific characteristics, the concept of a set of personas provides the differentiation across these types of communities. A persona represents a specific set of people with similar skills, knowledge, experience, attitudes, behaviours and beliefs. In addition, there may be some physical characteristics included in the personas, e.g. disability (hearing, sight, or loss of limbs, etc). Personas can be used for both internal and external modelling of the way the system works.

Some companies have recognised that non-management professional employees can contribute to the purpose of the organisation at a very high level. This need has created a dual career path were specialist jobs can receive compensation at high levels of salary equivalent to senior managers within the organisation.

This approach ensures that people are able to continue their primary focus of work have a compensation and benefits appropriate for this high level of contribution.

Personal objectives are used to focus a persons performance on an assignment. Personal objectives allow a person to take responsibility for their own contribution to the organisation and themselves (development).

A person learns through their predominate learning style and cognitive abilities. The paper by Howard Gardner highlights 7 intelligences where a person typically has 3 predominate learning styles

Learning improves a person's ability to adapt during changing conditions.

A person's problem solving ability also helps a person's ability to learn and adapt.

Organizational Psychology (all topics) Wikipedia

Problem Solving

Doug Englebart Institute

ISO 9001:2015

Baldridge and EFQM

Investors in People

PeopleCMM

Wikipedia: Social Networks

Organization System Description

Capabilities, Organizational Structure, Measurements / Reward, Plan

Team Model