What are skills?

Skills in TeamForm - what are they?

Definition: An ability or competency that people have that is related or their core role or capability.
People with the same role tend to have different skills. Moreover, not all people with the same role need to have the same skills. And if they do, this may be an opportunity to make it part of the role itself.
Skills are a logical extension of a role or job architecture
- e.g. programming languages or platforms (Java, Python, MS Azure, AWS etc.)
- e.g. governance competencies (Product Manager with ‘go to market’ skills )

To find someone with a mix of skills to fill a vacancy in a team (aka Staff Liquidity)
To make your team more autonomous (removing skill or knowledge dependencies from other teams)
To support capacity planning in an organisation needing certain skills for deliver
Positions, roles, skills etc.
- You can have: many skills and perform multiple roles in your position
- e.g. Position: Business analyst, Role: Facilitator, Skill(s): communication, analysis, domain knowledge

Skills can be highly subjective and there are many opinions on the same skill, quite often this is where governance and the person deciding on the skills definition needs to make a decision, even if it is not popular by all involved
Beware of analysis paralysis and an explosion of skills (e.g. nice to have vs actually needed)
- The effort to maintain the skills is greater than the value the skills offer
- No one is using the skills or updating them regularly (skills offer no value if the list stagnates)

When skills contribute to a business process (rather than abstract)
When skills contribute to a product, service, project as part of a value stream (impeding delivery)
When the list is short and heavily opinionated, rather than a large consensus driver cast of thousands

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Other external sources of inspiration / reference