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 having the same role need to share 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. For example:

• Programming languages or platforms (Java, Python, MS Azure, AWS etc.)

• Governance competencies (Product Manager with ‘go to market’ skills )

• Etc.

Why identify skills?

• To find someone with a mix of skills to fill a vacancy in a team (aka Staff Liquidity)

• To make teams more autonomous (removing skill or knowledge dependencies from other teams)

• To support capacity planning in an organisation requiring specific skills to deliver

• To clarify positions, roles, skillsets etc. As you can have many skills and perform multiple roles in your position. For example, imagine the following situation for a given person:

  • Position: Business analyst

  • Role: Facilitator

  • Skills: communication, analysis, domain knowledge, etc.

Potential challenges with using skills

The matter can be highly subjective and there could be many opinions to a same given skill.

Quite often this is where governance and people associated with the skill definitions need to make a decision, even if it is not popular by all involved.

Beware of analysis paralysis and an explosion of skills that would unecessary increase the complexity of the tool (i.e.: consider nice to have vs skills actually needing to be visualised).

Bare in mind:

• The effort to maintain skill definitions is often greater than the value the skills offer

• Generally, no one is using the skills or updating them regularly enough for the information to remain relevant (mapping skills offer no value if the list stagnates).

Recommended use of Skills in TeamForm

• 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-driven cast of thousands

Skills Implementation in TeamForm

Skill list can either be:

• Self-managed in TeamForm.

• Imprted from upstream system of record e.g. Workday Skills Cloud.

• Used for workforce planning, forecasting, navigation or reporting.

Related information