The Skills Database

Author: Arjun Thomas
Filed under: Knowledge Management, Project Management

Thursday
Jun 18,2009

As a Project Manager you are expected to know the strengths and weakness of the people in your team. While this is great in theory it generally takes a while before you gain a fairly good understanding of these skills and where best to use them ( unless of course you’ve worked with the very same team members before ).

This is of course challenging when you are in charge of a fairly large project, here you would probably bestow this responsibility on your project leads in the hope that they will have a better understanding of the skills of the team members.

I”m sure we all agree that is an unstated expectation to running a successful project, it will allow you to speed up reaction times and ensure that the right people are chosen for specific tasks thereby saving you a lot of stress when the going gets tough.

While most organizations do mandate that their employees update their skills fairly regularly this is a practice that is for the most part overlooked.by the average employee. So it might make sense for you to create a small database ( this could be an excel ) which allows you to keep track of your teams skills.

The Benefits of implementing such a system are self evident:

Ability to keep track of the skills of various team members
Faster reaction time in case of project emergencies
Ability to leverage team members better
Perform a skill check for the team as a whole
Create individual development plans for team members

This list needs to be updated at least once every quarter, to ensure the skills are current. While this is a tedious and time consuming task it is necessary for the long term success of the project. in extreme cases make it a mandate for your team to update this with their information. Just keep in mind that the sheet should capture only information essential to you ( technical / functional knowledge , soft skills , etc ).

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