Understanding Team Capabilities
It can be helpful in many team contexts to take stock of what skills team members bring to the table. Doing so can be helpful in numerous ways, for example:
- Seeking to have balanced staffing when setting up multiple teams
- Identifying areas where some teams can mentor others
- Recognizing areas where one or more team members might want to grow their skills
The good news is that there are existing tools and techniques that can make it considerably easier to get a read on team capabilities. In this post, we’ll take a look at a couple of them:
- Team Competency Matrix
- Staff and Team Capability Matrix
Team Competency Matrix
The Team Competency Matrix, which is one of many Management 3.0 Practices, is a particularly good choice when there is a need to do one or more of the following:
- Learn which areas people might be interested in learning more about
- Learn which areas people have significant experience with and can mentor others in
- Align team skill sets with organizational needs and objectives
As articulated on the Management 3.0 description of the practice, the basic idea is to fill in a matrix, where for each team member, the following color-coding scheme applies:
- Expert: I can teach it. (Green)
- Practitioner: I can do it. (Yellow)
- Novice: I can learn it (Red)
Thus we could end up with something like this:
Suppose we’re talking about a group of Agile practitioners; the types of skills we might choose to focus on might look something like this:
- Agile estimation and planning
- Agile product management
- Business Analysis
- CI/CD
- DevOps
- Facilitation
- Kanban, Lean, and Flow
- Operations
- Pair Programming
- Portfolio Management
- Scrum
- Test Automation
- Test-first Development
If we’re talking about one or more feature teams, then the skill mix might look more like this:
- Back end web development languages
- Cloud platforms
- Containers
- Data engineering
- Data science
- Front end web development languages
- Linux Operating Systems
- Mobile app development languages
- Test automation tools and techniques
- User Experience tools and techniques
Note: An Excel template is available for download.
Staff and Team Capability Matrix
On the Focused Objective Articles Spreadsheets and Tools page, one of the many tools available is the Staff and Team Capability Matrix (spreadsheet).
The spreadsheet has six tabs:
- Readme (summary pasted below)
- Settings (what sorts of skills are needed, on which teams)
- Survey Sheet (survey questions to be used to gather team inputs)
- Inputs and results (there are only a few editable fields, having to do with when skills will be needed, with how much lead time)
- Planning and stabilizing teams (guidelines on stabilizing teams, splitting teams, etc)
- Calculations (place to enter raw data from survey questions)
Summary:
The Staff and Team Capability Matrix helps evaluate staffing risks associated with the relatively propensity of specialist skills. It is particularly good at highlighting areas where there is only one “expert.”
At a high level, the steps when working with the Staff and Capability Matrix are:
- Enter the people and their associated skillsets in the Settings worksheet.
- Collect feedback from team members, using the Survey worksheet.
- Use the spreadsheet to calculate how many people can create, maintain, or are willing to learn each skill, and to make decisions based on the analysis visible at the bottom of the Current Assessment worksheet.
As a general rule, for any given capability, at least two people should be able to create and maintain. If and when there is only a single team or single person who has expertise, it will be important to train more to avoid staffing risk.
Note: See the Focused Objective GitHub repo for a comprehensive set of tools and other resources.
Conclusion
The Team Competency Matrix and/or the Staff and Team Capability Matrix can be helpful when exploring capabilities and any gaps that might exist. Take them for a test drive and see what you think.
