A skills management framework can help retain staff and
increase efficiency through a better understanding of the roles and
skills in an IT department.
Finding the right person for a particular job can be difficult
in a project-driven environment like IT. Training people in the
necessary skills is only one part of the puzzle; getting a clear
picture of the skills portfolio that your IT department needs to
match the direction of the business is another.
And if you do not keep on top of it all, you can end up
constantly firefighting the skills gaps left by high staff
turnover. For Angela Clements, head of information services at West
Dunbartonshire Council, staff turnover was high because people felt
that they had better career opportunities elsewhere.
Although Clements had contingency plans in place to minimise the
problem, the IT department and its internal customers still
suffered. "We have a helpdesk recording all the requests coming in
and we had a backlog because there was a learning curve as we took
someone else on and got them up to speed," she says.
A quick-fix solution to such problems in the IT industry has
traditionally been to bring in contract workers to plug the gap,
but Clements did not have the money to do this. Contractors can
cost more than permanent staff and offer only a short-term solution
to what, for many organisations, is an ongoing problem.
Instead, Clements used the Skills Framework for the Information
Age (SFIA) to improve the situation. The SFIA is an IT skills
framework put together by organisations including the British
Computer Society and sector skills council E-Skills UK.
The SFIA is designed to enable managers to better align the
skills of individuals within their IT departments to broad areas of
work such as service delivery, strategy and planning, and
development. The idea is to create a more structured definition of
roles within IT, and the skills needed to fulfil them. IT managers
can then use the framework to analyse the skills they have within
the organisation and spot weak points.
Clements and her team used SFIAPlus, a framework that the BCS
produced by marrying the SFIA with its own Industry Structure Model
training and development standard. Using SFIAPlus, employees can
manage and monitor their career development plans online and take
it with them to different employers. It has drastically reduced
staff turnover at West Dunbartonshire, meaning the council no
longer has to fight fires, but can instead concentrate on
bolstering existing skills within the organisation, Clements
says.
A critical part of Clements' repertoire is the Career Developer
service, the online component of SFIAPlus that enables employees to
monitor their skills development online. This database of skills
was built using software from Infobasis, which specialises in
skills management software.
According to Don Taylor, strategic alliances director at
Infobasis, IT leaders should not underestimate the importance of
feeding employee skills information into a structured database. It
is the first step on the path to making smarter decisions about
staff allocation.
"Let's say the Paris office phones up the London office asking
someone to come and present some software to someone in France.
They have to be an expert on the software, they have to speak
fluent French and they have to have excellent presentational
skills," Taylor says, arguing that it is unrealistic for this
information to be kept in a manager's head or in a spreadsheet. "In
an organisation of 400 people, you cannot know who that person is
unless you have that information available to you," he says.
The other benefit of putting this information into a database
and tying the whole thing together with a standard skills framework
is that it can help you to manage your training more effectively,
says Taylor.
This type of approach can help managers prepare their skills
base to achieve long-term goals, says Richard Hordern, a managing
consultant at training organisation QA. "Whatever your long-term
strategy is, you have to be thinking about what skills you will
need for the future. Then you have to assess yourself against those
future skills and be developing those skills among your people," he
says.
As an example, an organisation with a certain growth target in
its business plan may plan on outsourcing certain IT functions in
the future. Consequently, although third-party contract management
may not be an appropriate skill now, two years down the line you
may want to be prepared.
Third-party contract management is an example of a "softer"
skill that will become increasingly important in the next few
years, according to David Flint, research vice-president at analyst
firm Gartner. He is convinced that detailed technical skills will
become less important as IT departments attempt to engage with
businesses at a more strategic level. As IT interacts more deeply
with the business, he says, skills surrounding change management,
teaming, organisational structure, incentives and corporate culture
will take precedence over skills such as Java development and
database administration. Some industry frameworks must bolster
non-traditional roles to stay current, he warns.
"I have had some contact with the SFIA framework, and we are
pushing to broaden that out to include a wider range of information
professionals," says Flint, citing librarians and information
officers as examples. "We need to take a broader view of these
competencies."
Whether or not you focus on grooming employees with managerial
or technical skills or both, training strategies must also evolve.
Charles Jennings, global head of learning at information agency
Reuters, has moved towards performance-related training as a new
model within the company over the past three years. "We have been
moving away from just providing a bespoke or generic training
program to employees on a 'sheep dipping' or pick-and-mix model,
and we are becoming more deterministic about it," he says.
Jennings identifies what he calls a "conspiracy of convenience"
around conventional training models. Managers throw training
courses at staff without properly analysing the necessary skill
requirements. After the training occurs, the only metric is a
reaction to the course - post-training performance is not a
consideration. The manager feels that they did their job, the
trainer says that they did their job, and the company does not
benefit.
"They go into an immersive environment for a week, and quite a
lot of what happens there is knowledge transfer and skills
development. They come back and they lose the knowledge very
quickly," says Jennings.
Although he continues to invest in training for staff, Jennings
has also signed a contract with Skillsoft for access to its Books
24x7 resource - a searchable database of thousands of IT books.
Having initially bought 1,250 access licences in late 2003,
Jennings subsequently increased this to 4,000. The advantage is
that employees learn specific skills related to a technology area
while solving problems on the job, he says. This enables them to
not only focus on the specific areas they need to learn to do the
job, but also helps them to retain that information because they
link it to real-world tasks.
Jennings also uses a skills framework within Reuters called the
Global Role Framework, which defines every role in the company and
categorises them into different families. Each employee is mapped
on to a role, which helps managers to allocate job scope, key
responsibilities and professional skills.
"If you are in one role and keen to get in to another, you can
look on the database and decide what you need to close the gap to
get in to the role you want," he says. Learning interventions are
then linked to those role movements, a traditional classroom-based
course, mentoring, or a job swap. Managers then monitor the
employee's progress through traditional performance reviews.
The bottom line for IT departments wanting to manage employee
competencies more effectively is to think in the long term.
Tackling the issue strategically will enable you to build a more
solid foundation of skills within your team, and avoid the
short-term firefighting that can cause so many headaches. However,
building the frameworks for those skills may require some
customisation to suit your company's own particular personnel
structure. Be prepared to invest some time and effort upfront for a
payoff later on.
Case study: planning skills development in a disparate
environment
The UK's E-Government Interoperability Framework (e-Gif) is an
initiative designed to get the diverse array of incompatible
governmental IT systems talking to each other. It is one of the
foundations for the prime minister's vision of "joined-up
government".
One of the biggest problems is keeping track of who has the
relevant skills to design and implement the systems. e-Gif is the
government's attempt to unify the vast, disparate base of IT
systems across the public sector. One of the biggest IT revamps
ever attempted, pulling it off requires a considerable amount of
know-how.
"As organisations flatten and as IT skills become more
specialist, managers' ability to define what skills people need is
weakening," says Alan Bellinger, technical director for the e-Gif
Accreditation Authority, a government unit set up by the Cabinet
Office.
"In that environment, when people don't know what they don't
know, the whole self-development approach is weak."
Bellinger's unit created a skills framework for e-Gif to help IT
experts in local and central government understand gaps in their
knowledge.
Software from Infobasis was used to provide an online management
system for individuals to structure their own skills
development.
The e-Gif Skills Tracker categorises e-Gif practitioners into
three levels - basic, certified, and expert. As employees increase
their skills level through a mixture of knowledge management
systems and training, they can take internet-based exams to assess
their abilities and increase the number of competency and
experience points that they have on the system.
Different training company courses are mapped on to the Skills
Tracker to help individuals and their managers plan their training
strategies, Bellinger says.
"It creates a deliverable that if the performance plan and
review takes a two- to three-hour meeting, this is probably a
five-minute piece in the middle that gives some quality and depth,"
he says.
And for managers, it helps to reduce the exposure to risk among
the 115 councils and most central government departments that are
using it. The more that an organisation has gone down the e-Gif
path, the better they can manage the ongoing interoperability of
their systems, Bellinger says.
Understanding the capabilities of your staff is a key part of
making that happen.