Case Study: Implementing Skills Management and SFIA into a large, complex Business Change & IT Organisation
Client
Leading Financial Services organisation with Business Change & IT staff of 1500 across multiple sites.
Driver
The organisation needed to up-skill and re-skill c. 1500 FTE in order to implement a new Target Operating Model and bring about higher performance and maximise employee engagement.
The Challenge
- Need to significantly improve the professionalism of Business Change & IT workforce
- The organisation wanted to up-skill and re-skill many of their technical people
- This would bring about higher performance and maximise employee engagement
- The organisation was split geographically and had a varied interpretation of roles
- Inconsistency in skills and roles led to inefficiencies in resourcing
- The people management skill of line managers was low and many people managers were external contractors
Results & Benefits
- Consistent skills & competency framework enabled a number of high quality people management processes such as career development, recruitment & resourcing
- Generic role profiles enhanced flexibility of staff and enabled more efficient resourcing
- Role profiles generated higher performance by making clearer expectations for all professionals
- Greater data-driven insight to skills in the organisation supported recruitment and skills and capability development
- Tracking and skills development over time and linking to improved organisational performance
- Savings in budget by identifying common themes and smarter sourcing
Solution
- Identify implications for the workforce from the future operating model of the organisation
- Agree design principles with key stakeholders
- Research external and internal best practice and incorporate into the principles
- Identify key professions and assign lead people from each profession
- Define small number of professional roles for each profession.
- Map these roles to an industry standard Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) as well as key behavioural competencies and functional BC & IT skills
- Automate skills assessment for efficiencies of collation, assessment and use of the data to provide business insights
- Utilise the skills data collated to drive business decisions re BC & IT skill development
Success Factors
- Engagement of all members and stakeholders – encourage the community to grow from within. Coach & mentor rather than direct action.
- Focus on business context for each community – exploit high potential areas – do not force the same model and same business agenda on all
- Learn from others – create strong community amongst the community leaders
- Inclusion of all employees into at least one community
Project Deliverables
- Approx 40 professional profiles covering 7 professions / career families
- Guidance notes for assessors (individuals, managers, moderators)
- Skills (SFIA) database populated
- Moderation approach defined and documented
- Amended people management and budgeting processes
- Skills development plan
Speed bumps & pitfalls to overcome
- Many managers needed to be brought into the assessment. Mixed quality of managers and their ability to assess technical skills of some of their direct reports.
- How to moderate and calibrate skills assessment
- How to select a manageable number of skills for the framework
- Feedback to individuals had to be handled sensitively
- Data protection issues
- Fears from individuals about how the data would be used
- Focus of role profiles – current v aspirational