When do technical teams need business skills?
At TeamFit, we spend a lot of time talking to people who build teams, team managers, and team members. And we dig deep into how each of these people thinks about the skills they have and the skills of the people around them. We are beginning to see some common patterns, and some of those patterns give cause for concern.
As a company, our target markets are business consultants, systems integrators and the professional services teams at information technology companies. In practice, we are finding that the latter two have a lot in common. They tend to be working on technical projects with well-defined deliverables.
Technical projects imply a lot of relatively well-defined ‘hard’ skills that are used to do the work that leads to the deliverables getting delivered. These projects typically have many tasks carried out by more than one person with a lot of interdependencies so some level of project management is often important (although many technical people look down their noses at non-technical project managers who try to organize their work).
Not surprisingly, when we look at the skills records for these projects (one of the things that TeamFit does is build a record of what skills were used on each project) one finds that technical skills dominate. Actually, ‘dominate’ is not a strong enough word. Non-technical skills are near absent in most skills records for technical teams.
I picked ten project records for technical teams that I have access to on TeamFit (there are more than 270 project records on TeamFit already but I do not have access to most of these for privacy reasons). This is a highly biased sample. It is teams on one system (and an early-stage innovative system at that) that one person has access to. So no generalizations should be made. But these preliminary findings are interesting.
My first challenge was to decide how to categorize the skills. At this point, TeamFit does not handle this so I used my own judgment. One approach would be to use the conventional thing and divide skills into hard skills and soft skills. This sounds simple but it is not. What is considered a ‘hard skill’ and what a ‘soft skill’ changes depending on the type of project. For a technical team a marketing skill like Price Optimization may look like a business skill; but for a marketing team the same skill would be seen as a technical skill. Context is everything.
But for this little review all the teams were technical teams so I divided the skills into Technical Skills, Business Skills, Soft Skills and Meta Skills. Here are some examples.
Technical Skills: Software development, security, software configuration and installation, hardware development and installation, software maintenance, hardware maintenance
Business Skills: Project management, finance, marketing, business analysis and negotiation
Soft Skills: Skills related to emotional intelligence such as communication, empathy, active listening
Meta Skills: Basic capabilities that underlie the ability to acquire other skills, such as learning and cognition.
OK, what is listed under technical skills is heavily skewed to the technology industry. This reflects our current user base. I hope that as use of TeamFit widens we will see a much wider range of technical skills. But using the above categories, here is what I found on examining ten projects:
Four hypotheses come to mind. What jumps out here is that these teams are claiming very few non-technical skills. Vanishingly few. Why?
The people on these teams have these skills and are using them where needed but don’t think of them in the context of a technical project, they are in the background.
The people on these teams have these skills but are not applying them on these projects.
The people on the teams lack soft skills, business skills and meta skills.
Of course all of these could be true for different teams and different individuals, but I don’t see any way to tease the answers out of the data (is this a weakness in the design of TeamFit?). These are generally skilled and intelligent people, so we can be sure that pretty much all of them have at least some strong meta skills, they know how to learn technical skills. And most people on technical teams are pretty good at communicating with each other (some may struggle to communicate with non-technical people) so they have communication skills as well.
It may be that people on some of these projects feel that they are not learning, and so are not applying meta-skills. But it is just as likely that they take learning on the job for granted. I suspect that there is a lack of business skills on at least some of these teams and that on others the business skills are there but not being used. In general, I think that business skills and soft skills ‘don’t get any respect’ on many technical teams and that we don’t think of meta-skills – learning skills, reasoning skills – as skills at all.
What have you experienced on technical teams? Are business skills and soft skills in short supply? Or do people have these skills but fail to apply them? Or is this really just a problem with how this skill data has been collected? Let’s share our experiences. You can e-mail us or drop in a comment below.
For variety, and so you can see how this data was collected, here is a screen capture from a non-technical team (one I am allowed to share). How would you categorize this set of skills?
