63 things you can do with SFIA
SFIA is a flexible framework with many direct and indirect uses.
This makes SFIA a very powerful tool but it does come with a health warning; be wary if someone tells you how to “implement” SFIA.
- The real question should be “What are your IT workforce related challenges and opportunities” and how can adopting SFIA help you tackle them.
To illustrate this point I have collated a list of 63 activities which SFIA can support.
- These are real examples – I have either done these myself, helped organisations to do these or seen them in action in other organisations.
- They are curated from
- my personal experience initially as a SFIA user and then as a SFIA consultant
- sharing experiences with SFIA Users via the SFIA User Forum and the SFIA Council
- SFIA Conferences
So if someone suggests you implement SFIA – which of these 63 things are in scope? And why?
To help make sense of them I have categorised these using the IT Talent Life cycle which many people will be familiar with.
- In reality, many of these examples can span more than one of the categories.
- The other feature of the framework is that it does NOT come with a prescriptive set of processes. You can do whatever you like with SFIA!
- To adopt SFIA and achieve your target benefits you will typically need to create new processes or adapt your existing people management processes.
Although this is a long list of uses – I am sure there are many other uses of SFIA.
- If you do know of anything you think should be added then please let me know.
Organising & Planning the IT Workforce
- Develop IT Talent strategy
- Design of IT Career families
- Design and creation of Professional communities of practices
- Organisation design
- Role design
- Organisational skills – gap analysis and prioritisation of skills development
- Validation of a Target Operating Model
- Design outsourcing model
- Workforce planning
- Simplify job language to enable Position management
- Integrating 2 IT organisations
- Writing role profiles / job descriptions
- Supporting process / technology driven transformations
- Transition of start-up organisation to mature IT organisation
IT Workforce Talent Acquisition
- Creating job specifications for one off ad hoc recruitment
- Creating job specifications for a one off recruitment campaign
- Creating job specifications for All recruitment
- Screening candidates
- Assessing candidates
- Outsourcing – review of staffing
- Outsourcing – specification of demand and supply
- Internal recruitment
Deployment of IT resources & skills
- Deployment of IT professionals onto client assignments
- Resource management
- Finding subject matter experts within your IT workforce
- Creation of 70:20:10 / developmental assignments
- Reducing dependency on Contractors – reduce risk and cost
- Managing a diverse workforce – multiple locations , geographies, cultures
Assessing & Analysing IT Talent
- One off organisational skills assessment / skills audit
- Personal skills assessment
- On-going skills assessment as part of performance management / personal development
- Internal promotion / recruitment criteria
- Benchmarking for IT Certifications
- Making “buy v build” decisions
- Making sense of complex IT roles
- Prioritisation of training / development activities
- Benchmarking performance – internal
- Benchmarking performance – external
- Managing performance problems
- Clarifying and explaining performance gaps
- Developing line manager capabilities
- Identifying the risks of losing key staff
- Identifying resourcing risks and contingencies within teams
- Retaining key IT staff
Developing the IT Workforce
- Supporting IT strategic workforce development for transformations / significant change program
- Creating a learning and development catalogue
- Measuring outcomes of L&D programmes
- Defining learning outcomes of academic programmes
- Defining career paths
- Improving line managers capabilities
- Designing and implementing IT Career development processes
- Improving the quality of career conversations
- Developing high performing IT organisations and people – improved engagement / productivity
- Demonstrating professionalism / instilling confidence in stakeholders
- Positioning IT qualifications
- Applying generic HR High Potential (HiPo) processes to IT organisation and roles
- Training & development to support new Service Management processes
- Applying 70:20:10 model
Rewarding the IT Workforce
- Designing salary guidelines
- Job evaluation
- Benchmarking for individual recruitment
- Support for annual salary reviews
- Dealing with restrictions on IT salaries (e.g. public sector)