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In every job there’s a range of tasks. Plumbers don’t only install pipes, they also diagnose problems, work in awkward confined spaces, and apply physical strength to jammed mechanisms. Architects don’t only imagine what a building could look like, they draw it, plan spaces that feel good to live in, and deal with council planning departments.
People aren’t equally good at all the tasks that their job involves. In most businesses people know that someone is particularly good at something. You might go and ask that person for help if you get stuck. But it’s tacit knowledge. No one ever writes this stuff down. We didn’t either, until we created the Skills Matrix.
The Skills Matrix turns out to be a powerful business development tool. First, it shows at a glance the full spectrum of what we do as a software development business – the problems we solve, the modules we create, the tools we build, and the techniques we use.
Second, the Skills Matrix tells us who is good at what, on a scale from 1 to 5. This is valuable operationally – when we are allocating a team to a new job we can use the Skills Matrix to ensure the right skills are there, and the team members complement each other.
Third, the Skills Matrix means we can identify an individual’s weak areas and ensure that he or she progresses. It’s a powerful career development tool.
Fourth, the Skills Matrix reduces the risk that only one person in the business has a specific skill.
Fifth – and perhaps most important of all – the Skills Matrix has become an ever-expanding handbook of techniques – a database of the best, most reliable, fastest ways to solve a large range of different problems. When we add a skill to the Skills Matrix, we don’t just name it, we record how we do it.
The Skills Matrix all started from a collection of files that our software developer Eilish had accumulated on her computer. When she finished a job or solved a problem, she would record the techniques she had used so that next time she needed one she could instantly remind herself of how best to do it. Most of us don’t do this. We assume we’ll remember that cool way of doing something that we once stumbled upon. But how often do we forget? Eilish made sure she wouldn’t.
Others in the team began to notice these files, realised Eilish had some clever ways of doing things, and wanted to be able to look at the files. Soon the Eilish files were put on a Decent Group server, and others began to add their own smart ideas to the folder. Sometimes two people had different ways of doing the same task, so discussions would ensue, mutual learning would take place, and the best idea would win – or a new synthesis of the ideas would emerge.
At this point we realised that this was too good to keep in a corner of a server. It deserved to be formalised.
Today the Skills Matrix contains around 150 different techniques. Some are broad, like the basic principles for integrating Xero with FileMaker. Others are highly specific, like how exactly to create a ‘photo grid’ which allows users to see 4 photographs at a time with a paging function so they can see and interact with photographs in a modern user friendly and intuitive format.
The Skills Matrix also lists all our software developers. Each has to assess themselves for each of the 150 skills, giving a score between 1 and 5.
The self-assessment is moderated to make sure people don’t over- or under-score their skills (the best people generally under-score themselves).
The Skills Matrix is not static. We review it quarterly. We are always discovering new techniques, and usually find out about them at our post-project reviews. If there are two different ways of doing the same task, we have a careful discussion, ponder it all, and eventually identify the best way to do it. The technique is then described in some detail and added to the Matrix, along with files that show it being applied. This can include videos, or snippets of code, or complete example code files that can be used in a testing environment to understand and play around with the technique in an isolated environment, so our developers can really get to grips with it.
Where several people have the same skills gap, we arrange a training session run by someone who is a 5 at the skill. During the training you have to show you can do the technique yourself. You then have to do it in a real job at least twice, with a 5 assessing your work. If it’s up to scratch you’ll be scored as a 4.
But not everyone can do everything, and not everyone should be able to do everything. Some people know a lot about servers, others leave servers well alone, and that works fine as long as enough people in the business know how to handle servers. People are naturally good at different things, after all, and we work with that rather than trying to override it.
Above all, the Skills Matrix gives us visibility. It’s all there in front of us. This knowledge gives us power. The power to ensure we have the right skills in the right places, the power to do training when it’s needed, and most of all, the power to become smarter as a business.
The Skills Matrix has accelerated our development as a collective intelligence. We now not only know what we know, we keep expanding what we know, and refining it as we go.
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