Skills Database

Many organizations that supply professional services employ highly skilled staff, where specific skills or a combination of skills are required for individual tasks.  Maintaining a comprehensive skills database is crucial for effective resource utilization.

Innate software supports the resource management process through:

• Demand management or capacity planning
• Rebalance the workload with scenario analysis
• Allocating resources to tasks

Typical contents of a Skills Database

In large matrix organizations, where resource and project managers collaborate in getting the workload most effectively resourced, it is particularly important to have a comprehensive skills database. It needs to store each person’s set of skills and any other attribute that will help identify staff that can best do the work.

In practice the database will often contain details of each person’s:

• Role or Team – often used when looking at capacity planning
• Skill set, with levels of competency, e.g. JAVA 1, C++ 2
• Details of the systems or applications expertise
• Location
• Grade – often used to link to a standard cost rate
• Languages spoken
• Industry sector experience

If more detailed data is required, for example, history of recent projects worked on, personal aspirations and development goals etc, the HR system is a better source. Many organizations have a link between the HR system and the skills database for resource management, so that the skills database is kept in sync with HR.

As part of the system implementation process, Innate configures the skills database so that each person’s skill sets can easily be maintained. Often each individual has access just to this part of their resource record, to keep the data up to date in the simplest way. A range of standard reports show the demand vs capacity by skill, to highlight trends and identify staff retraining requirements, where appropriate.

Without current skills data, services organizations cannot maximize utilization of their expensive staff. Maintain your skills database easily with Innate software.