Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.

Most of the work done on use cases and user stories for skill and competency management is focussed on the organization. This is understandable. These platforms are bought by organizations to address compelling organizational needs. But a skill and management program that is focused only on the organizational use cases will probably fail. At a minimum the program needs to address organizational and individual use cases. In the case or organizations built on team work, a rapidly growing number, team use cases are equally important.

Connect individual, team and organization level use cases

In designing your first skill and competency management program, see if you can choose a use case from each of these three buckets and have the organization, team and individual use cases reinforce each other.

A simple example. One of the most common use cases for skill and competency management is to answer the key business questions

What skills are available to the organization?

How are these skills being applied?

It is easy to state these key business questions for the team and the individual.

What skills do I have? and What skills does the team have?

and

How am I using my skills? How is the team using its skills?

Connecting the presence of skills and their use at the three levels of organization is a powerful way to introduce skill and competency management.

Presence is potential. Application is performance.

A good skill and competency management platform connects the Skill Presence and Skill Use use cases across all three levels. It does this by showing which skills are used for jobs, roles and team roles. (See The Future of Work is a career braid of our different roles.)

Another example of complementary use cases is future skills. The organizational question…

Will we (the organization) have the skills needed to meet tomorrow’s goals?

Restating this for the individual…

Will I have the skills I need for the work I want to do in the future?

One can apply the same approach for teams.

What skills will the team need in the future?

But there is a more revealing question to ask around teams.

What kinds of teams, with what skill combinations, will we need in the future?

The nature of team work is changing and this is requiring new kinds of teams and new forms of teamwork. The skill and competency management platform needs to support these new modes. These include hybrid teams made up of employees, contractors, partners and even customers, goal seeking teams that have come together to figure out what they should do together (many start-up companies are best understood as goal seeking teams) and open teams (teams that anyone can join).

In most cases, one wants to understand the present state, and establish a baseline, before jumping into one or more possible futures. But there have been effective skill and competency projects that begin in the future and work back. Sometimes this leads to discovering new, unrecognized, or emergent skills in the present. An interesting example of this is the Future Skills Centre that the Canadian government is sponsoring.

The use cases for Individuals - Teams - Organizations

Here are some of the common use cases for skill and competency management with possible connections across the three buckets mapped out. (This is a bit complex and we are developing a set of connection circles to better explain this.) The most connected use vases are in bold.

Organization: Support Skill Growth, Enable Internal Mobility, Predict Performance

Individual: Show My Skills, Develop Future Skills, See My Career Paths, Know Who to Work With

Team: Build Skill-Based Team, Find Person for a Role, Find Person with Missing Skills, See Complementary Skills, See Connecting Skills.

Complementary skills are the skills often used together but by two different people. A user interface designer and a front end-engineer is a technical example. In a restaurant, a pastry chef and grill chef have complementary but very different skills.

Connecting skills are the skills that help people exchange ideas and work together. In many engineering and scientific fields mathematics provides a strong set of connecting skills. In business, a knowledge of how a profit and loss statement and balance sheet work can be connecting skills between finance and business leaders.

Why Individual Use Cases are critical to the Adoption of Skill and Competency Management Platforms

Ignore the individual use cases at your peril. Skill and competency management platforms are most effective when people engage and provide data. They will only do this if there is value for them as individuals. Their interactions with the system need to create direct value for them and the people they work with. For some people this is about career, for others it is about developing their own skills, and for still others it is about supporting their teams and the people they work with.

Team Use Cases for Skill and Competency Management have the Most Impact

Most of us work not for the greater good of our organization but for the people we work with day-to-day. Our team. Things that make the team stronger and more effective are highly valued and team use cases are important. Understanding each other’s skills and helping each other improve and build new skills is critical to teamwork.

It is also important to get the right people with the best mix of skills onto teams. Ibbaka Talent is designed to help you do this.

Note the direct connection between predicting organization performance and predicting team performance. This reflects the reality that more and more work is done by teams and it is teams that are the fulcrum for value delivery.

Organization level use cases provide the business rationale

At the end of the day it is the organization that is footing the bill for the skill and management platform, so there need to be compelling use cases at the organizational level. Fortunately there are.

Some of them are quite technical. Organizations need a common model rich enough to represent jobs, roles and skills across the organization. Reuse of job descriptions and skill data across multiple systems eliminates multiple data entry and replaces is with a single source of truth. This makes it possible to manage change across multiple systems (changes to common capabilities, job components, global jobs, local jobs and specialized jobs) and to get insights into the impact of changes (learning interventions, changes to jobs, acquisition and talent turnover) . But that is only the plumbing.

The real impact of skill and competency management is to energize the organization around skills, teams and performance. This results in…

More engaged people working in
A more resilient organization
That can adapt faster
Performing at a higher level
As it prepares for the future

That is the promise skill and competency management can deliver.

For more information about how to get started, see our post on how to build a competency model

Which use cases will have the most impact at your organization? Let's start a conversaion.

Ibbaka Posts on Competency Models and Competency Frameworks

Competency models as learning plans

Individual - Team - Organizational use cases for skill and competency management