To win in professional services apply the right skills to the right project at the right time
We all have the talent religion. We talk about our people as our most important asset, we say we invest in our people, and we stay up nights thinking about engagement.
None of this is enough.
To win in professional services you have to make sure that you get people with the right skills together on the projects where they will have the most impact. And to do this you have to have deep insight into the real skills people are applying to projects. Very few companies have this (fewer than 5% according to our research).
The Skill Map in TeamFit gives you real insight into skills distribution, who has used which skills on what projects, where you re strong and where you are at risk.
Here is the Skill Map for Insite Consulting (names changed and some data altered). Looking at this, can you guess what kind of work this firm is focused on? Many of their top skills are the ones used in designing go-to-market strategies – market segmentation, marketing strategy, Economic Value Estimation or EVE™. And indeed, that is a mainstay of their business.
With just under 100 consultants, Insite has a lot of skills. About 650 at this point in time. So scrolling down we can some of the less commonly used skills. These tend to be skills used on a specific project (like ‘Digital Citizenship’) or emerging skills that are just starting to surface at this firm (like “Cloud Data Analysis”).
Skills data has a long tail. But some of the long-tail skills are actually critical to differentiation. They are like trace minerals in food. You don’t need a lot of them, but you will die without them. For Insite Patent Strategy is one such skill. In fact, for many firms one way to fine the differentiating skills is to look for those skills that only a few people have, but the people who have the skill are at a very high level and the skill is being applied across multiple projects.
Sometimes we want to drill in on a specific skill. Here we look at Design Thinking to see what projects are using this skill.
And we drill down to look at a specific project where Design Thinking is being applied and see what other skills are being used.
At the end of the day, skills are something that a person has. They may be used on a project, and a company may engage the person, but the skill belongs to the individual. At Insite, Jim Gauss has a lot of high-end math, data analysis and programming skills. These are also some of the trace minerals that give Insite its differentiation. And the vector for these skills is Data Analyst Jim Gauss.
Does your company have deep insight into its skill map? Do you know how you are applying skills to projects? And what are the trace minerals that drive your differentiation?