Retaining Critical Skills in Your IT Organization

Guest blog by Nicholas Colisto, SVP & CIO at Xylem Inc., excerpted from his book, The CIO Playbook: Strategies and Best Practices for IT Leaders to Deliver Value. Copyright © 2012, Nicholas R. Colisto. Used with permission of John Wiley & Sons.

Your IT staff has an inherent need to sustain the existing skills that keep your operations well supported. At the same time, being able to learn new skills to meet challenging business demands is equally important. Categorizing skills into levels of importance to the business helps to identify the most important skills as critical.

Critical-skills assessment modeling (CSAM) is a best practice that helps IT leaders identify, assess, and retain critical skills for their business. By its very nature, CSAM helps you identify your "high potentials" (HIPOs) for both a management and a technical career track. By identifying the most critical skills in your department, including technical and people leadership skills, you can quantitatively identify your most valued employees.

Critical-Skills Assessment Modeling

Simply put, CSAM is a process whereby you identify the critical skills in your department as well as any gaps in experience and capacity with those skills. If you have gaps in either category, you and your company are at risk. The following outline is a simple, step-by-step guide to implementing a CSAM program for your business.

Step 1: Establish an Inventory of Critical Skills

Work with your staff to create a list of IT skills that are critical to support the business. After you have established the list, categorize the skills by functional area (e.g., desktop, networking, accounting applications, and system security). Identify the functional owners of each skill, as appropriate. For example, the skills relating to supporting an accounting system are typically owned by the IT manager of the accounting system or team.

Step 2: Have the Staff Members Assess Themselves

The next step is to work one-on-one with the staff members so they can rate themselves on their level of proficiency with each skill. Ideally, there should be a healthy mix of expertise as well as an opportunity to gain further knowledge. Several companies already ask their staff members to perform annual self-assessments on various competencies as part of a performance review. The difference with CSAM is it helps the departments get an understanding of the employees with experience in the critical skills and the amount of coverage available in the department.

Here is an example of a rating system:

Level 1. Working knowledge of the process and/or technology skill. The individual can provide limited support for the process and/or technology skill.

Level 2. Proficient in the process and/or technology skill. The individual can:

•     Support the implementation of the process and/or technology skill.
•     Support the delivery of training on the topic and assist with supporting users.
•     Demonstrate experience with the process and/or system.
•     Troubleshoot and resolve some issues.
•     Assist with the authoring of technical specifications for changes that are moderate in complexity, including integration between systems.

Level 3. Expert in the process and/or technology skill. The individual can:

•     Lead and execute the implementation of the process and/or technology.
•     Deliver training on the topic to users.
•     Troubleshoot and resolve the most complex issues.
•     Independently author technical specifications for significant changes to the system, including integration between systems.

Step 3: Have the Managers Assess the Staff Members

After the staff members complete the self-assessment, the managers should assess them for the same skills identified above. This is common in the performance review process; implementing CSAM just adds another level of detail and dialogue relating to capabilities and performance. The fundamental difference is that CSAM helps you rate technical skills, not just soft skills.

If a skill is owned by another IT function, do not have the staff members rate themselves on the skill without consensus from the skill owner. I have observed situations where individuals rated themselves on skills from another IT function and the manager of the function did not agree that an individual had experience in the skill.

Step 4: Perform a Risk Analysis

Once you have conducted both assessments, you can determine your level of risk with each of the critical skills in your department. Here are examples of risks to examine:

High Risk
    Critical skills with no coverage.
    Critical skills with only one employee rated at any level (no backup).

Medium Risk
    Several employees have proficiency in a skill, but there are no experts.

Low Risk
    Only one expert, but several employees have proficiency with a skill.

Step 5: Build a Mitigation Plan

Once all critical skills have been identified and assessed, work with your management team to identify potential risks in their functional areas. After you have identified all of the risks, develop a mitigation plan, which should initially focus on creating activities to alleviate any high-risk areas. Mitigation plans can consist of actions on how to close gaps immediately or be more involved and include training, hiring consultants, or even outsourcing the skill. Each critical skill that is deemed a high risk should have a mitigation plan with a specific completion date. After you have established a plan for the high-risk skills, move on to create plans for medium-risk and low-risk skills.

The Challenges in Building CSAM

The fundamental purpose of CSAM is to ensure that your organization has adequate coverage for all critical skills despite the natural course of attrition. While it naturally helps you identify the strong as well as the weak players in your department, CSAM should be implemented with caution so as to avoid people panicking by assuming that you are using the information to reduce the staff. If your staff perceives that the purpose of the assessment is to weed out less experienced employees, they will rate themselves higher on skills even though they may not possess the knowledge and experience of that level. If this happens, you will never get a realistic assessment of your team.

As IT leaders, you must communicate your vision clearly and maintain a collegial environment throughout the CSAM process. If you do this, your teams will have a positive view of the program and welcome the exercise as an opportunity for them to build skills and improve their ability to deliver value to the business.