Before we officially started The Independables over a year ago, we created a business plan to think through our services and offering, financials, and of course, our growth model. In that growth model, we, like most people setting up a new organisation, envisioned a steady growth in people that we could add to our payroll. But that vision has changed.

That change was triggered when Corona swept through the world. Working relationships have changed, we all heard about the ‘Great Resignation’ as it was called in the USA, the same applies here in The Netherlands. People started to realise that a more balanced work-life mix is very valuable. The return to the old days, where we worked from the office 100% of the working days, will probably never return.

This reset (after Corona) also brought all kinds of supply chain issues: shortages of raw materials and semifinished products, increased freight costs and a shortage in personnel. Translated to our business, in which we look for experienced Project Managers, attracting new employees has become challenging. Most experienced Project Managers are happy in the role they fulfil (as employee) or started for themselves as a freelancer. With many nice opportunities to choose from with each new assignment. Convincing freelancers to leave their well-paid freedom to start as an employee, is very difficult (as we have noticed).

Our ambition to grow remains, but the model to be used to achieve this growth, has changed. From our initial plan to add employees to our payroll (hierarchical organisation) we are investigating the networked model and apply both as a hybrid model. Finding employees to add to our organisation will remain our focus, but we also know that growth will be accelerated if we apply a networked model. Why a networked organisation, you might wonder? A networked organisation works very well in high complex environments. Most of our assignments do fit that condition. Hierarchical organisations fit better for environments where the complexity is very low.

A networked organisation offers many advantages, but how to set one up? How do you measure upfront the quality of each individual you want to add to your organisation, how to make sure that the quality you aim to deliver, remains high? In my next blog posts, I intend to shed some light on that, but I’m very curious on your feedback to this question:

”How do you measure upfront the quality of Project Managers to be added to a networked organisation?”

Your experience and feedback is highly appreciated, please let me know your thoughts!

You can reach me at jan.veerman@theindependables.com