In the ever-evolving landscape of modern work, you are likely looking for ways to improve efficiencies within your group and to keep up with the pace of business. Whether you’re embarking on a cloud migration, implementing new technologies, or enhancing your data strategy, one critical factor can make or break your success— the capabilities of your workforce.

Imagine a future where your organization thrives and seamlessly adapts to change. This can be your reality, but the key lies in strategically assessing and leveraging the talent within your organization.

A skills inventory is a powerful tool that enables you to systematically assess and document the knowledge, skills, and abilities of your employees. By creating a comprehensive record of their capabilities, you gain valuable insights for workforce planning, talent allocation, upskilling initiatives, and even informed decision-making for selecting the right platforms and tools best suited for your team.

It’s difficult to predict the implications of your skills inventory- potential outcomes could include reorganizing teams to centralize or decentralize skills (depending on your goals), upskilling, and /or growing your team. To best prepare yourself, collaborate with your talent management team or with one of our organizational change management experts. By following the steps below, you will be able to harness your organization’s talent throughout your modernization journey.

1. Identify Relevant Skills

What skills are important and relevant for this modernization? Perhaps you’re looking for a headcount on who has the skills for data science, or maybe you’re curious about whether you have the skills to for enterprise architecture in-house. The skills inventory can include technical skills, interpersonal skills, industry-specific knowledge, certifications, and qualifications. A proven way to figure out what items to include in the skills inventory is to conduct a job analysis for critical roles.

2. Determine Assessment Method

There are many ways to gather information about tasks, knowledge, and skills (interviews, focus groups, surveys). We recommend creating a survey and validating the results through manager feedback and HR data.

• Self-Assessment: Create and launch a survey where individuals can indicate their skills, proficiency levels, and the amount of time they spend on certain tasks. Since this would be self-reported, validate the results through manager feedback or talent management data.
• Manager or Peer Feedback: Seek input from managers or colleagues to provide insights into their observed skills and competencies.
• Talent Management Data: Review performance evaluation records, feedback from previous projects, and gather insight your Human Resources team might have on talent reviews.

3. Collect Task, Knowledge, & Skills Data

Once you determine the assessment method, begin the data collection process. This may be through timeboxing a survey to dozens or hundreds of employees, scheduling manager interviews, and reviewing available talent data. Ensure that the data collection process is well-structured, consistent, and accessible to all individuals participating in the inventory. Pro tip: when conducting a survey, ensure the items are set up in a way that will make cleaning, analyzing, and interpreting results easier.

4. Organize and Analyze Data

Organize the collected data in a structured format, such as a skills matrix, database, or HRIS platform (many HIRIS talent management modules can store skills and document plans for internal mobility). Categorize the skills based on the skill areas or job functions and analyze the data to identify patterns, trends, and skill gaps within the organization.

5. Utilize Skills Inventory

You can leverage the skills inventory results for workforce planning, talent allocation, skill gap analysis, succession planning, and platform or tool selection.

• Workforce Planning: Identify the skills available within the organization, assess the demand for specific skills, and identify potential skill shortages or surpluses. This is how you can make informed decisions regarding recruitment, training, and talent allocation.
• Talent Allocation: Match individuals with specific projects, teams, or tasks based on their skills and expertise.
• Skill Gap Analysis: Identify areas where training or development initiatives are required to address skill gaps. The results allow for targeted training programs and career development planning.
• Succession Planning: Identify individuals who possess critical skills required for key roles within the organization; this helps in developing talent pipelines and succession plans.
• Platform and Tool Selection: Compare existing knowledge and skills to your technology plans; you may be able to minimize disruptions to work by selecting tools and platforms your organization is already familiar with.

Ultimately, harnessing the potential of your organization’s talent through a strategic skills inventory is key to thriving in the ever-changing landscape of modern work. By systematically assessing and documenting the knowledge and skills of your workforce, you gain insights that drive workforce planning, talent allocation, targeted upskilling initiatives, and informed decision-making for platform and tool selection. Embrace this transformative journey, leverage your talent, and make adaptability to change the new norm.

Forbes predicts that by the end of 2023, 84% of mid-to-large companies will have adopted a multicloud strategy. IT leaders have long understood the benefits of cloud adoption and now, most enterprises are a embracing a hybrid and multicloud strategy that includes a combination of on-premises infrastructure, private cloud, and public cloud. Successfully embarking on this journey requires leaders to understand that the people-related changes of new knowledge and behavior are just as important as the technology changes. Moving to the cloud will prompt new ways of working which will require taking inventory of your available skillsets, upskilling, bringing in new talent, and launching new operating and organizational models. To do this all successfully partner with organizational change management experts to guide you through this journey.

Preparing Your Team for their Cloud Journey

To best prepare your team for the changes that will impact the people-side of their cloud journey, ensure you have taken the following activities into account:

A Case for Change provides the vision and overall business rationale for the move to the cloud (why are we doing this, what’s in it for me) and serves as the foundation for future messages and activities including Communications and Training.

The Change Roadmap identifies strategic and tactical activities to prepare the organization for technical changes and changes that impact the processes, roles, and tools people use to work in the cloud over a high-level timeline.

The Skills and Talent Assessment takes inventory of existing technical and organizational skills to identify team capabilities and the gap between the current state and desired state. This output will be critical for upskilling and training plans.

The Organization Model Assessment analyzes the current IT organizational structure with the desired future cloud-based organizational structure and recommends a sequence to move the organization to the new model with clear roles and responsibilities (Spoiler alert! Consider forming your strategy and governance teams first).

The Cloud Enablement Training Plan maps roles to relevant training available and identifies timelines for self-paced and instructor-led training sessions for long-term success of the cloud environment.

The Communication Plan provides a comprehensive list of communication-based activities across all impacted stakeholders. This dynamic plan guides communication activities over the course of the project, defining details for each communication event to specifically address who, what, how, where, and when.

Additional Information

For more information on the multicloud journey and to learn about IAM, hybrid connectivity, governance, monitoring, infrastructure automation, and more read our recent publication, The IT Leader’s Guide to Multicloud Readiness.

We’ve seen the headlines. We’ve read the articles. Technology transformations are here and appear to be never ending. As a matter of fact, they are accelerating. Organizations are prioritizing their technology initiatives and increasing their IT budgets; yet the majority (about 70%) of these initiatives do not reach their goals. Perhaps because technological change is much bigger than it might appear; especially, when the technology spans across the entire organization or touches multiple critical processes. While the technology might be happy to squeeze right into its new environment, the people that work with or benefit from the technology will need some help. There are a few things we can do improve the quality of your technology initiatives by identifying barriers, minimizing resistance, and enabling change.

Conduct an Organizational Readiness Assessment

You might be ready for change, but is your organization? An organization is made up much more than just people and technology- there are invisible structures, policies, processes, and expectations in place that can aid or hinder a transformation initiative. Conducting an organizational assessment before embarking on your new technological journey can ensure your key stakeholders are aligned, that you have the right organizational structures and systems in place, and uncover behavioral patterns across key groups that might enable or resist change.

Leverage Your People

Bring in the change management experts to work as partners with your stakeholders. Afterall, nobody knows your business better than your people. Involving and leveraging your people will empower them to take ownership and help push this initiative through rather than have it be dictated to them. Your people can make the change and adoption happen; we’re here to provide some help.

Enable Change

It will be incredibly difficult, if not impossible to manage change without enabling it. Enabling change means ensuring your people are ready, willing, and able to go down this journey with you. This involves providing them with the right information at the right time, ensuring that learning and development needs are met (from analysis to training delivery), and providing adequate time to learn and adjust to get through and beyond the initiative.

As technological and digital transformations continue to lead the way in change management initiatives, it’s important to keep in mind how these transformations fit into your overall business strategy, environment, and how your people will react. By making sure your organization and your people are ready and adequality equipped, you can enable change and watch it unfold before your eyes.