By Tony Scott

As a services organization, your employees and contractors are your greatest strengths.  Without them, you cannot deliver what’s needed to provide value for the business.  So that begs the question, do you know what your bench strengths are?  In most cases, you probably do – with one caveat – you know the skills they have to do the job they are assigned, but do you know what the other skills they bring to the table?  Probably not… 

I wanted to spend some time with this blog discussing some basic block and tackling techniques of manage the skills on your team.  Why is this so important? 

• Changes in corporate strategy impacts projects and systems you are assigned to work on
  Impact: You may need to train, reassign, or add resources to your team to support these assignments

• New technologies are introduced that you need to support – the classic example here is mainframe teams now having to support open system architectures
  Impact: Again, training, reassignment, or augmentation

• M&A activity always involve some level of organizational change and moving resources to accommodate new business priorities
  Impact: You may very well find yourself in a position to have to reorganize your team to fit the operating model of the new company

• Changes in market conditions
  Impact: In difficult market conditions, you may be faced with making some tough choices about who stays and who goes.  Making those decisions based on quantifiable data will make those choices more straight forward and help take the emotion out of the decisions. 

• Career growth for your employees
  Impact: Having an understanding of all of your team’s skills will help you develop training plans that can help them towards their career goals, and ultimately make them happier and more loyal employees. 

To start the skills evaluation, begin with what you need to support the systems and projects within your purview.  Detail those skills and cross reference your employees against those skills.  Then start looking at other skills that your team members bring to your organization. 

You will also want to inventory other skills that may not be related to technology, such as customer service skills, writing, presenting, or other soft skills that could potentially serve your team.

So now you have a complete inventory of your skills.  But all skills do not have equal importance.  For you to meet your operational and strategic objectives, you will naturally place more importance on specific skills that are needed to meet those objectives.  By weighting all skills to highlight those identified core skills will help determine training needs within your team.  It also makes justifying the budget for training easier by quantifying those training needs.  I use a simple weighting factor from 1 to 3 (1 being least important, 3 being highest importance). 

All that is left to do is evaluate each employee.  Again, I use a scale from 1 to 3 (1 having no or minimal experience, and 3 being an expert).    

It is important not to share this skills matrix with your team, unless you have leaders reporting to you that have direct reports themselves.  Beyond that, these reports should be treated as confidential information and protected from disclosure to your team as a whole.  You can (and should) share the individual assessments with each of your team members as a way to help facilitate career and performance discussions.