Wondering how you can make the most of the skills data that you're collecting? Here's how to use skills data tactically and strategically.
Managing employee skills data is a task that should be on the list for all organizations. But if your business model relies on turning that human expertise into profitable projects, it should be pretty high on that priority list of yours!
From ace-ing delivery and balancing budgets, to planning capacity and right-sizing the workforce, skills management is vital to business success.
It’s about knowing who’s good at what, and how well that matches your project needs - which means you can assign folks to projects where they can work to the best of their abilities, delight clients, and drive revenue.
And in the long-term, it can also help you build sustainable hiring strategies to build capacity and versatility as an organization.
In this article, we’ll dive into how to use skills tactically and strategically to advance everyday operations and long-term objectives, as well as giving you some pointers on the kind of data you need to be collecting in order to make the most out of these intiatives.
Tactically, skills data is used to optimize day-to-day operations and project delivery – picking the right people for project tasks, making the best use of available team members, and making sure projects are delivered to client satisfaction. Here’s how.
The main tactical use of skills data is to allocate people to projects. Projects require people with particular skills to complete them to an appropriate standard. Not only that, but those people need to be available at the right time and the right cost. Skills mapping lets managers find the perfect person.
For example, say a new design project is onboarded. The project manager does a work breakdown structure and plans the project schedule. They need someone with intermediate Adobe Illustrator experience between April and June. Equipped with a skills inventory, they can search or use filters to find someone with Illustrator skills, at an appropriate level, available when required – and allocate them to the project. This ensures the project can proceed on schedule and deliver the required quality.
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If there isn’t someone available with the right level of skills for the project to go ahead as scheduled, the manager can initiate a discussion about recruitment or use resource leveling techniques to resolve the issue.
Allocations aren’t always at the discretion of individual managers. Sometimes, resource decisions are made at staffing meetings.
Staffing meetings are regular get-togethers between resource management, delivery leads, sales, HR, and finance – to ensure the organization has the right mix of people and skills for current and future projects. So, of course, skills data is essential here too.
In a staffing meeting, participants discuss projects in hand and in the pipeline, quantify the roles and skills needed, and compare this to the people and skills available. This facilitates discussions about how to prioritize projects and allocations, to ensure in-demand skills are put to the best use.
Skills data also informs discussions around gaps that need filling and the strategies to do so – such as recruitment or upskilling.
(Another meeting that’s informed by skills data is an interlock meeting. This is when staffing needs from different departments are consolidated into an organization-wide report on capacity and skills gaps. Read more about interlock meetings and reports ➡️)
A final tactical use of skills data is when resource or project managers use it to match individuals to assignments that will develop or delight them. The aim is to use work allocations to increase employee engagement, productivity, and overall staff satisfaction.
Say you have two resources that both have web design skills. But in your skills inventory, you’ve noted that one of your designers is passionate about comic books. Now imagine you onboard a web-build product for a bookstore that specializes in international graphic novels. That person is much more likely to get excited about this project and give it their all – engaging their enthusiasm and leading to improved deliverables.
Further reading: The benefits of respecting employee preferences ➡️
Or, maybe you have a resource who is disengaged and concerned that they lack challenge in their work. You can use your skills data to match them to projects that will stretch them and provide professional growth opportunities. In doing so, you might just re-engage and retain them in the business.
Strategically, skills data is used for capacity planning and workforce optimization – ensuring you have the right mix of people, roles, and skills to deliver your strategic objectives. Here’s how skills data can support long-term success.
Strategic capacity planning is concerned with forecasting future resource demand and making sure you can meet it. It’s about securing a supply of the right people and skills to deliver future work. And skills data is integral to this planning process.
By analyzing skills data relating to the current workforce, leaders can compare current workforce composition to future forecast needs, and conduct a skills gap analysis. This helps understand whether the business can meet its strategic goals with the existing staff. If not, skills data helps identify hiring needs or upskilling opportunities.
For example:
Of course, the analysis might not find skills gaps. It might find a glut of skills that are no longer in demand. By looking at skills data by utilization, it’s possible to spot underutilized skill sets.
Rather than making these roles or people redundant, leaders can choose to retain the resources – and all the valuable organizational knowledge they hold – and retrain them in more in-demand skills. This is a strong alternative to layoffs and reduces the cost and disruption of reactive hiring-firing cycles.
Talent development is an essential component of strategic workforce planning. We’ve discussed above how skills data can inform this at an individual level – connecting people to projects they’ll love. However, it’s also important at a higher level. Creating individual staff development plans is actually an organization-wide strategy to increase engagement, retain employees, reduce turnover, and save unnecessary costs.
Another use is succession planning, to ensure continuity in leadership as key roles retire. By analyzing skills data, organizations can identify employees with the potential and ambition to step into leadership positions, as well as any skills gaps that need to be addressed.
Now we've built a castle in the sky with all the possibilities that skills data can create for your business, let's bring it crashing back down to reality!
Most organizations do not have the skills management structure in place to collect and maintain the data that would unlock these strategic initiatives for them.
In fact, when we dug into the issue on a recent webinar, we actually found that only 30% of our audience were using a dedicated tool for skills management.
Skills data should be collected in a central skills inventory, like a database or resource management system. This means that everyone who needs to refer to skills data in their decision making can access it easily, giving them visibility into the full complement of skills and capabilities in your organization.
At a minimum, your skills inventory should include:
This basic information on skills and level – sometimes known as a skills matrix – will let you search for resources based on their expertise alone. However, to be a truly effective in tool in helping people find the resources they need – particularly in terms of schedule and budget – your skills inventory should also include information on availability and billable rates.
If you create a skills inventory, begin populating it with data from your resources, and implement processes to keep the data standardized and up to date, you will soon find that it gives you a strategic advantage in maximising the unique talent within your organization.
Skills data is easy to record, search, use, and analyze with Runn.
