Critical Success Factors

There are a lot of various conceptions of what CSF is. However most of experts agree that CSF are key areas of organizational activity that determine the success of company's projects, missions and goals. In other words CSF are things which company should focus on and gain there good results in order to be competitive, to obtain advantages over competitors, to be long-term successful on market and to achieve company goals. These factors can vary depending on business type, industry and particular company. CSF are significant for any organization's future, thus each company should identify own unique CSF. In general for many companies the examples of such factors are offering of competitive products, effective distribution and advertising. All objectives associated with CSF should be achieved, because non-achievement of proper result in these strategic areas of activity can cause loss of business advantages, loss of profit and as a result crash of the enterprise. CSFs are closely related to company's goals. That's why efforts of all company staff, from owner to average worker, should be devoted to winning of strong positions in these critically important areas.

There are four main types of CSF:

Industry CSF's follows from specific industry characteristics. Different industries have different CSFs. Even within same industry CSFs are not identical from company to company. For example:

Objective: Achieve market share locally of 15%.

CSF: Increasing of customers quantity, increasing of competitiveness versus other local shops.

Strategy CSF's follows from the selected competitive strategy of the business. It depends on how company positions itself on market, what is the strategy of business and development.

Objective: Decrease time of client servicing to 50%.

CSF: Install PC-based customer service system.

Environmental CSF's follows from economic or technological changes. These factors represent environment in which company operates. They include things like the business climate, the economy, competitors, sociopolitical issues, technological improving and so on.

Objective: Expand assortment of goods to attract more consumers.

CSF: Discovery of new required local suppliers, arrangement of win-win relationship with them.

Temporal CSF's follows from internal organizational needs and changes. These are temporary conditions or situations in which the organization must achieve success in order to ensure safety of successful accomplishment companies main goals.

Objective: To decrease rate of employees' dismissal from work to 20%/year, retain best employees.

CSF: Increasing of employees' morale, offering of a better hiring terms.

Define your CSFs and decide in what way you are going to control and measure each of them. Keep monitoring and reevaluating your CSFs to be sure that company resolutely moving towards targets . The critical success factor of any company is proper technological support of the business (hardware and software). VIP Task Manager is software that is intended for team collaboration, team task management and small projects management. As we mentioned before all company staff should be involved into work at CSFs, each employee should contribute his/her share.