Assessing Internal Skills

Whether you get to handpick your project team or your team is assigned to you by management, you will still need to get a grasp on the experience levels of each team member. If you have an understanding of what your team members are capable of doing, the process of assigning tasks within the WBS and creating the project plan will go much easier for you.

As a project manager, you must create a method to ascertain the skills of your team. It would, no doubt, be disastrous to your project if you began assigning tasks to team members only to later learn they were not qualified to do the work assigned to them. In some cases, this will be easier to do than others, especially if you’ve worked with the team members before, interviewed the team members, or completed a skills assessment worksheet.

Experience Is the Best Barometer

As you gain experience as a project manager, you will learn which people you’d like on your team—and which you wouldn’t. If you are a consultant brought into the mix to manage an IT implementation, you’ll have to learn about the team members, their goals, and their abilities.

You must use strategies to recruit and woo knowledgeable and hard-working team members onto your team. This means, of course, you’ll have to do fact-finding missions to gain information on your recruits. As Figure 6-1 demonstrates, you have available to you many methods to assess internal skills.

Figure 6-1: Assessment of internal skills is derived from multiple sources.

Once you’ve started your fact-finding mission, rely on multiple methods to assess internal skills:

Prior projects Obviously if you’ve worked with your team members prior to this project, you’ll have a good idea who’s capable of what tasks. You’ll also have a record, through historical information, of who’s reliable, dependable, and thorough, and has other traits of a good worker.
Organizational knowledge You may not have worked directly with particular team members who have been assigned to your project, but you might have a good idea of their track record. Let’s face the facts: in your organization, it’s likely there are people you haven’t worked with, but you know the type of workers they are by their reputation, their ability to accomplish, and what others say about them. Gossip is one thing, but proven success (or failure) is another. The best way to learn about someone, of course, is not through hearsay, but to work with him or speak directly with his manager.

Recommendation of management You may not have the luxury of selecting your team members like you’re picking a kickball team at recess. You’ll probably be able to recruit some members of your team, but not all of them. Functional or Senior Management will have an inside track on the abilities of employees and can, and will, recommend members for your project. Management will also be able to select individuals who can commit time to the project.

Recommendation of team members Most likely, you will have other IT professionals within your organization whom you trust and confide in. These folks can help you by recommending other winners for your team. These individuals are likely in the trenches working side-by-side with other IT pros. Use their “scouting” to find excellent members to work on your project.

Resumes and Skill Assessments

Another source, if you have privy to the document, is the resume for each team member. A resume can quickly sum up the skill set of a team member. You may want the project team to create quick resumes for you in order to learn about the experiences of individual members. Use caution with this approach, however. Resumes have the connotation of getting, or keeping, a job, and your team members may panic. If you want to use this method but are uneasy using the word “resume,” have the team members create a list of projects they have worked on, their skills, and other past accomplishments. This will give you a way to quickly understand the collection of talent and then assign work to the team.

A collection of skills will also allow you to determine if you have the resources to complete the project. For example, if you’re about to create a database that will span 18 states, with multiple servers, and provide real-time transactions for clients, it’ll be tough to do if none of your team members have worked with relational databases before.

Create a Roles and Responsibilities Matrix

A Roles and Responsibilities Matrix is a method to identify all of the roles within a project and the associated responsibilities to the project work. This matrix is an excellent way to identify the needed roles for the project participants, identify what actions they’ll need to take in the project, and, ultimately, determine if you have all of the roles to complete the identified responsibilities. Here’s a quick example of a matrix for a software rollout project:

	Project Manager	Application Developer	Network Engineer	ZenWorks Expert
Create the application	A	C	P
Test the application	A	P	P
Package the application	R		R	P
Test the application release	R	R		C
Push the application to the workstations	A		P	C

Here’s the legend for this matrix:

A = Approves

R = Reviews

P = Participant

C = Creator

The Roles and Responsibilities Matrix can help the project manager identify the needed resources to complete the project work—and determine if the resources exists within the organization’s resource pool. Later in the project, the project manager will use an even more precise matrix called the Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) to identify which tasks are assigned to which individuals. We’ll talk more about this coming up.

Learning Is Hard Work

Within the IT world, a requirement for certification has become practically mandatory. Certifications such as the PMP, Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, Oracle DBA, and even industry certifications like CompTIA’s A+ and Network + are proof of knowledge in a particular area of technology.

Individuals can earn these certifications based on training, experience, or a combination of both. Certifications are certainly a way to demonstrate that individuals have worked with the technology, understand the major concepts, and are able to pass the exam. Certifications do not, however, make the individual a master of all technologies. As Figure 6-2 demonstrates, a balance of certification and experience is desirable.

Figure 6-2: A balance of certifications and experience proves expertise.

Within your team, whether there or certifications or not, you’ll need to assess if the members need additional training to complete the project. Training is always seen as one of two things: an expense or an investment. Training is an expense if the experience does not increase the ability of the team to implement tasks. Training is an investment if the experience greatly increases the ability of the team to complete the project.

When searching for a training provider, consider these questions:

What is the experience of the trainer?
Can the trainer customize the class to your project?
Would hiring a mentor be a better solution than classroom training?
What materials are included with the class?
What is the cost of the course?
Is there an in-house training department that can deliver the training, provide assistance in developing the curriculum in-house, or assist in contracting with an outside trainer?
Would it be more cost effective to host the training session in-house?

These questions will help you determine if training is right for your project team. In some instances, standard introductory courses are fine. Typically, the more customized the project, the more customized the class should be as well. Don’t assume that just because a training center is the biggest that it’s also the best. No matter how luxurious a training room, or how delicious the cookies provided, or how slick the brochures are, the success of the class rests on the shoulders of the trainer.

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Assessing Internal Skills