In the project-driven culture of IT, skills are all. But
finding the right person with the right set for the task at hand
can be even more difficult when you do not know exactly what skills
your staff have - or indeed what skills the business needs to take
it in the direction it wants to go. Add to that the constant skills
drain created by heavy staff churn, and many IT departments are
locked into a hand-to-mouth reactive approach to meeting the
business's demands.
A skills framework offers a way out and a way forward. It can
engage with staff by offering them a transparent training ladder,
while giving IT directors a better understanding of the IT roles
and skills in the department. It can also paint a clear picture of
the skills portfolio needed by IT if it is to match the direction
of the business.
Case study: BAE Systems
Defence and aerospace company BAE Systems is the latest of a
small but growing number of companies to deploy an
industry-standard skills framework to manage the skills and
training of its IT workforce. It is using the Skills Framework for
the Information Age (SFIA) to help navigate the confusing array of job
titles used across IT, by identifying the underlying information
skills of each employee.
For BAE, the framework is key to improving the way it manages
and develops the capabilities of its IT staff, following a major
internal reorganisation.
But although the framework is simple in theory, BAE's managers
have found it challenging to implement at the same time as juggling
other major change programmes in the organisation.
The catalyst for adopting the framework was the decision by BAE
to outsource its IT in a multi-supplier contract last year. The
project led to the creation of a new, retained in-house IT
operation of 450 staff.
Feedback from staff surveys showed that the department's morale
had suffered following the reorganisation. Many IT staff felt that
training and staff development had taken a back seat, says Chris
Coupland, director of IT and e-business.
At the same time, BAE realised that the job roles and skills
needed by its in-house IT operations had changed significantly.
"We have changed quite a lot about what we think we should be
doing as an internal IT organisation, supporting internal IT in the
context of the outsourcing arrangement. And that means there are
new areas in terms of business requirements, strategy and
architecture, and to some extent commercial skills," Coupland
says.
Rather than use the standard SFIA framework, BAE decided to add
behavioural competencies to the usual technical competencies in the
framework. This was not difficult - it simply meant importing
concepts that were already used in other parts of BAE.
Coupland decided to give each IT director the responsibility of
rolling out the framework to their own team. Under the plan, every
IT professional is expected to map out their skills in the
framework, in relation to a standard job definition. These in turn
are passed to IT managers for validation.
The process, Coupland believes, will help BAE identify what
strengths it has on its IT team, and where there are any gaps. It
will also help BAE manage its outsourcing deals better.
"It will help us regain the ability to be an intelligent
customer, or at least an increasingly intelligent customer dealing
in an increasingly multi- supplier environment and the complexity
that goes with that," he says.
SFIA will also give BAE a common language it can use with its IT
suppliers, to help them define what specialists are needed for what
projects.
"Having the language and the debate has put this whole topic
much more firmly on the agenda than it would have done if it had
just been a talking shop about what we need to do on skills,"
Coupland says.
BAE has invested in software from Infobasis to manage the role
descriptions of each IT professional, and to provide a standard
template to manage the skills of its employees. The main challenge,
Coupland says, is that managers need to invest time and effort to
make it work.
"The real investment is the time you spend as an IT director
with your staff. There could be anywhere between five and 30 people
in your business. You need to work through their assessments of
their skills, your gap assessment for the role they are in, and
indeed, defining the role," he says.
But implementing the skills framework has not been plain
sailing. IT managers have simply had too many other issues to
contend with to meet the deadlines.
"We set ourselves a target of 2006 to deploy SFIA to the
majority of staff. And we are short of that because of other
business pressures. We are looking to rectify that in the first
half of this year," Coupland says.
"It is not difficult. It just requires some management thinking,
and in an operational business, going backwards and forwards with
lots of things happening, the trick is to force yourself out, and
to have a bit of thinking time to do it."
There are difficulties in calculating a return on investment
figure for implementing SFIA, but Coupland argues that the business
has no option but to implement it.
"As an executive you need to take those things seriously," he
says. "You need to look after your people and you need an
attractive place to work, where you can develop people. Whether you
use SFIA or something else is your choice."
Case study: Cornwall council
North Cornwall District Council was one of the first local
authorities to adopt SFIA. The framework is now being rolled out
across local and central government.
The council's ICT business manager, Russell Cosway, introduced
the framework to help the IT department complete the local
government fair pay and grading review. This major exercise
requires each member of staff to have an up-to-date job
description, and to complete a detailed job evaluation
questionnaire.
As a small council, with an IT department of only a dozen
people, Cornwall's challenges were on a different scale to those
faced by BAE. A potential hurdle was developing non- standard job
descriptions that reflected the multiple roles that each member of
the IT staff had to perform, says Cosway.
Cosway used the online SFIA Profiler service to implement SFIA.
The service, provided by public-private training partnership
E-skills UK, allows IT managers and staff to develop job and skills
descriptions through standard web-hosted templates.
"I could see an easy, cost-effective way of implementing it
without having to sit down and write job descriptions, which is
always the problem with these things," Cosway says.
The biggest challenge was working out a set of job roles which
reflected the wide range of activities carried out by the
relatively small number of IT staff at the council. "The profile
did give us 20 or so prefabricated job roles, but they did not fit.
They were just not big enough," he says.
So Cosway spent 20 to 30 hours working on extending the job role
descriptions, largely working at home outside normal office hours.
"Apart from the time, it is the difficulty of understanding the
crossover between the different skills - for example, the
management of development and development itself.
"There are people on my team who are developers and also manage
two or three developers. I did not know whether to give them both
skills, or one skill. In the end, you can have management at this
level, and development at that level," Cosway says.
Once the job roles had been described, the IT team were able to
assess their skill levels against the list of competencies in each
job role. Cosway worked with them to ensure each member of staff's
assessment truly reflected their capabilities. He also helped them
to identify areas they wanted to develop, and to factor that into a
staff development programme.
Implementing the framework has had tangible benefits for the IT
department. Most immediately, it helped the IT department complete
the fair pay and grading review smoothly - a major exercise that
consumed much of the council's time last year.
"The SFIA profile gave us a consistent baseline, consistent
wording, consistent measures," Cosway says. "We were literally able
to cut and paste to fill in the review questionnaire."
Equally importantly, the framework has provided the IT team with
a clearer understanding of their skills, and how they fit in with
the needs of the IT department and the council. As a result, IT
staff are thinking much more about the business needs of the
council, he says.
"People are now interested in the strategy of the business on
the IT team. From the perspective of 'we think we can develop in
this skill area' to 'we can provide the business with this because
we can see where the business is going.' Previously we were
probably not interested in the business because we were very
task-oriented."
The framework is also helping IT staff identify gaps in their
knowledge. Cosway enrolled in a training course on managing
successful programmes, and other staff have identified training
that could benefit their roles.
"The team as a whole needs to develop. It is no good developing
everyone in one area. Fortunately, I have a team with their own
personal areas of expertise which are diverse enough to fill all
our needs. But we do have skills gaps, and a few of them are
thinking of stepping into those areas," he says.
Six months on from rolling out SFIA, and having gone through a
major period of organisational change during the fair pay and
grading review, Cosway says it is still too early to measure the
impact that SFIA has had on delivering IT projects. But he is
confident it will make a difference.
"SFIA has refreshed the IT department. Everyone has a new job
description. Everyone is very aware of the targets line management
has given them, and what skills they need to fulfil. We have the
capability to build performance measures, and we have a team who
know where they stand," he says.
What is SFIA?
The Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) is designed
to help organisations match the skills of their workforce to the
needs of the business.
SFIA can help to identify gaps in the skills of IT departments,
and to implement programmes to develop staff in the IT skills the
business needs for the future.
Organisations that have deployed the framework claim it has
significantly improved the efficiency of their IT departments,
reduced staff turnover and motivated IT teams.
The framework was created five years ago by the British Computer
Society, sector skills council E-Skills UK and the Institute of
Electrical Engineers. Further developed over the years, SFIA is now
in its third version.
How the framework works
The Skills Framework for the Information Age is tracked on a
grid, with the columns representing the relevant skills for each
job function arranged under categories ranging from development and
implementation, to sales and marketing.
Personal skills could include factors such as the ability to
work without supervision or being able to communicate well.
Business skills vary from role to role, but a systems developer,
for instance, might be expected to have skills in business
analysis, data analysis, systems design, database design and
software development.
The rows represent levels of competence, ranging from the
ability to follow instructions to the ability to set strategy,
inspire and mobilise.
Managers can use the framework to assess the skills of their
employees through interviews and discussions and to work out what
further training or project work they need to progress to the next
level.
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