Integrated Skill Management

A skill gap analysis reveals how offer and demand agree in the case of specific qualifications.

Personnel is the most important success factor for an IT organisation, in terms of both quality and quantity. According to current figures, staff account for around half the costs of IT, including application support, project business and also IT management and governance. Inefficient deployment of specialists, inadequate skills, functional redundancies and over-qualification are reasons for when an organisation is not working properly. Nevertheless, personnel costs are not fixed costs. They can be optimised by various activities.

In the worst case, an attempt is made to cut salaries and daily rates across the board. This is a dangerous strategy because it entails the risk of high follow-up costs and an exodus of specialists. Early counteraction would make more sense here to cut the expense of separation and new recruiting, to keep qualified experts, to attract high potentials and junior staff and to avoid putting a strain on the work climate. This is also why the positive effects of comprehensive and integrated skill management extend far beyond the pure cost discussion.

What enterprises demand of skill management

• Keeping personnel costs in check (salaries, daily rates)
• Globally standardising requirements (IT, HR and purchasing)
• Making skill demand measurable (at present and in future)
• Making personnel strategy plannable
• Tying specialists to the enterprise and promoting talents

Only a small number of enterprises has globally standardised the definitions of positions and skills both regionally and functionally. Thanks to integrated skill management, IT organisations, HR departments and purchasing departments can precisely define what qualifications, and what variants of those, belong to a position such as that of the senior consultant, for example. Standardised language simplifies internal handling of job advertisements and external resource procurement. Thus, costs and prices can also be compared with ease across borders, for example within a corporate group or when costing nearshoring projects.

Comprehensive planning

In an integrated skill management system, IT employees' qualifications are no longer based on appraisals by their functional superiors. Thanks to detailed assessment, individual resources are recorded across departments, are made comparable and are assessed on a standard basis. Thus, enterprises can warrant comprehensive planning of resources and skills. A skill gap analysis reveals how offer and demand agree in the case of specific qualifications. Thus, IT, Purchasing and the HR department can take the initiative in good time for long-term planning activities.

Enterprises with a large outsourcing share are primarily interested in the prices of their external employees and providers. Here, current data can be determined and assessed by means of a market price benchmark test. By contrast, firms that mainly provide their own IT have to set up and expand personnel to be able to assert themselves against the demographic transformation and the technical innovation cycles. Here, the benchmark test points out organisational strategies and best practices of comparison enterprises that are confronted with similar challenges.

Long-term reusability

In integrated skill management, a position is described by qualifications and competence levels. For example, these include information management, information security, data analysis, system design, database design, programming, software development and system integration. Thanks to qualifications and their respective levels, the skill profiles that describe a position best can be found in the database. In total, more than 75 standardised skill definitions are available which, if applied professionally, will ensure long-term reusability in the enterprise. Benchmark projects show how IT positions are staffed in the peer groups and what skills are currently in demand. The benchmark test extends skill management with the market perspective and also with other organisations' experience and best practices.

Consistent personnel management enables …

• A simple system and non-technical language for IT management, HR and Purchasing
• Stock-taking and precise matching between requirements and provision, stringent market conformity and also role and capability descriptions in the sense of an industrial standard
• Exact information on current and skill-oriented market prices
• Standardised internal and external job descriptions
• Maximum support for project staffing, personnel planning and personnel development processes
• Assessment of productivity and also measurement of organisation and process maturity
• Skill gap and skill mix analyses, support with make or buy decisions, a comparison of offshoring and nearshoring projects and also right staffing and right sizing of organisations

Author: Tobias Peper-Nagel, Managing Consultant Maturity