Skills Mesh for Teams — a technique for self-organisation

I’m always on the lookout for simple but powerful techniques that empower teams to improve and thrive. The skills mesh is an old and proven favourite.

I first applied the skills mesh technique around a dozen years ago. I was working in a software team that was about to lose an experienced and valued team member — let’s call her Amy — who was not renewing her contract. We had a few weeks to handover critical knowledge and up-skill others in areas where Amy was the go to person and back-up was limited.

Where to start?

Rather than focus on Amy exclusively we used the opportunity to visualise how the team stacked up as a whole. We started by brainstorming a list of 15 or so key skills (including knowledge areas) that were critical to our team. Something like this:

1. User Story Creation
2. Frontend Development
3. Backend Development
4. Database Management
5. Business domain familiarity
6. Ten more skills / knowledge area …

Next, we laid them out as rows in a matrix on a whiteboard, with team members in columns.

We had everyone self-rate themselves on a 0 to 3 scale, a bit like this one, for each skill / area:

Then we stood back, and looked at what was going on. Something like this … with about 15 rows in total, laid out like this:

Tip: Colour coding helps bring out the patterns

Based on that we were able to see where Amy was the single point of failure — i.e. where she was the highest rated and the sole 2 or 3 — and quickly identify who might step up, and put together a transition plan.

Based on the numbers for the first five skills, we can see that Amy is the key person for Backend Development and Database Management:

• Backend Development: Craig and/or Derek (the 2s) will need to step up
• Database Management: Same, but bigger (no 2s in the team!) — will we need to get outside support?

More holistically — just treating the 5 rows as representative of the whole mesh — Amy’s departure takes away half the 3’s on the team, so there are some big boots to fill. How will this effect team morale, performance, and reputation?

Beyond Amy leaving:

• The team could do with upping its User Story Game, and maybe Eve could take a lead on this
• Looking at columns we can get some sense of where each person is putting their currently relevant skills, and where there might be immediate opportunities for growth

More applications

Nowadays I recommend the skills mesh technique to both recently established and long-lived teams as a generally useful technique, beyond identifying key person dependencies and succession planning. It’s quick and easy and has several additional applications:

1. As a sense check of whether the team as a whole have the skills for the current project (and any other responsibilities)
2. To assess where training or other support is required
3. To get a sense of load balancing between team members: Who might be overloaded? Who is underloaded?
4. To figure out opportunities for people to up-skill with immediate pay-off to the organisation or client
5. To identify specific skills or knowledge areas for mentoring, successorship, and/or peer-to-peer learning

Q&A

1. How robust is the self-rating? I think it’s fairly self-correcting, due to social forces. If you rate yourself a 3 you will be expected to take the lead, and if you don’t you will be quickly found out. If you under-rate yourself that will similarly become apparent, although some people may under-rate themselves in an area in which they are tired of bearing the load. That’s worth discussing.
2. How often should you revisit the skills mesh in a long-lived team? For a long-lived team a regular cadence makes sense, e.g. every two to three months.
3. How often should you revisit the skills mesh in a short-lived team? In a short-lived project I recommend doing it at least twice: soon after launch and at the mid-point of the project (while there’s still time to make adjustments).
4. Any other time? Yes. When someone is leaving, when someone is joining, or whenever it seems useful!
5. Is it foolproof? NO! If trust is low, people want to rate each other, or the team has significant blind-spots — you don’t know what you don’t know — it will be hard to apply. In these cases, you probably have bigger problems to tackle first!
6. Is it extensible? YES! At Everest Engineering we have augmented the workshop format with colour-coding, categorisations, and emojis to squeeze out more insight.

Emojis can bring out emphasis

Emojis in context — a slice from an actual team

And various teams have introduced follow-up activities, including:

• running brown bag knowledge sharing sessions
• individual professional development actions, and
• baking the learnings into sprint work.

Please treat these ideas as suggestions: you may choose to extend it in different ways. Let’s not overcomplicate things at the outset!

Limitations

Can the skills mesh be applied to career development? Partially. Because the skills mesh focuses on what the team needs in the short and maybe medium term, it misses areas that are of long term interest to individual, if they are not on the team’s current radar. A complementary approach is needed to assess what else team members want to develop or need for promotion, and one could use this in combination with the skills mesh to help balance out a team-member’s short-term aspirations with longer term career plans, and their overall alignment with their current duties and potential for growth on the present team.

Should someone facilitate the exercise? Yes. Well facilitated, in a high trust environment, this can be a fun exercise — and a fun workshop is a more engaging workshop! Also, for longer term benefits, it is critical to take a list of actions and re-visit those over time.

Conclusion

The skills mesh technique is a powerful yet straightforward technique for team empowerment and self-organisation. By visually mapping team members’ proficiencies against project needs, the mesh supports decision-making around key person dependencies, workload distribution, and training needs. With its adaptability and ease of implementation, the skills mesh is invaluable for nurturing team resilience and adaptability.

Credits+: I originally learned this technique from the brilliant Alidad Hamidi. I reckon skills mapping has been invented and re-invented many times over the years, and goes under many names, including: skills liquidity and skills mapping, part of a broader approach of Delivery Mapping [video]. Thanks to my knowledgeable colleague Martin Chesbrough for pointing these out. The good-looking graphics are from an Everest workshop format designed by the wonderful Pilar Esteban Gómez. And Allira Andreoni shared extensions from ongoing facilitation with Everest teams.