As an agile organization grows, it comes under increasing pressure to define the composition of skills in the organization. This is important for many things, including internal advancement, hiring, and professional & personal growth.
- relative skills between team members are more important than absolute milestones.
- skills matrix should be dynamic and evolving.
- Maintainance and creation of of system should:
- not be burden
- deliver value to contributor (ie. not just person doing hiring)
- be "in flow" for contributor
- involve employee participation as much as possible (relatively ranking themselves and others)
Would be amazing to create a system to create a dynamic graph of skills in the organization by making small simple polls of employees. The format might be as simple daily email that went out asking employees to rank a given number of peers in order of skill based on various metrics. The relations would be no more granular than "Higher", "Lower", "Same", or "Don't Know". The reply could easily add a new skill that this person would like to submit into the system for the next round. Over time, the system could intelligently harvest the internal understanding of employees to contruct a graph of skills for The system could optimize in that, it learns which comparisons would best fill holes in the system's own analysis, and pose the right questions to reviwers.
For example, the system could simply ask:
Q: Who is better at Javascript: Neil or Patrick?
A: Neil.
Q: Rank these people relative to your own Chef knowledge: Matt & Erin.
A: Erin, Matt, me.
Furthermore, as certain skills begin to be insufficiently granular, the system could break skills into subskills to help increase clarity. So if it was recognized that many developers had similar Javascript knowledge, there would likely be a "clump" of people in the same skill range. The system could theoretically allow this to be broken up into sub-skills within Javascript, which would help provide higher resolution on that skill.
- Consider how value could be provided to the average employee who might simply like to know where to improve (skills vacuum), or where the business most needs skills (perhaps with bonuses involved).
- Consider how this network graph might be used in hiring, and how it might add value.
skills management, skills matrix, HR, human resources, evaluation, automated, maintainability