Software may be eating the world, as Marc Andreessen says, but it is doing so by embedding itself into things and then connecting them into larger systems. The handle for this massive trend is the Internet of Things or...
“The future is here, it is just not evenly distributed.” William Gibson Governments are preparing a massive renewal of infrastructure. In Canada, the government plans to stimulate the economy with a $125 billion infrastructure fund. In the United...
Skill profiles are the new calling card. They are how we introduce ourselves to people and show what we can do. Building a great skill profile is part of the day-to-day work of all knowledge workers. So how do...
Your skill profile is as unique as you are, but unlike your fingerprints, your profile adapts with experience and you can intervene to shape these changes. Skills are the new currency of work. This is especially in the professional...
Over the past decade, HR in professional services has become increasingly complex. There is a need for new tools that give deeper insight into people’s real skills and how they are being applied on projects. The payback for HR...
Please take the Design Thinking Skills and Applications Survey – Share Your Insights How do you build a new skill set? That question is coming up a lot lately, in part because it is the beginning of the year...
Talent Management looks at you from the outside while Skills Management is looking at you from the inside out. TeamFit is what connects the two. Chuck Hamilton 2017 is shaping up to be the year of ‘skills.’ Everywhere...
It is the beginning of the year and many of us are finalizing our capabilities development plans for 2017. What questions should we be asking to test and inform these plans? These will differ on the organization, team and...
Professional services companies depend on leadership for success. This is true for all companies of course, but it is especially true for companies that rely on the skills of their people to succeed. If you are the CEO of...
Almost all of us have some leadership role to play today. Knowledge workers are generally responsible for their own performance and for supporting their teammates. At TeamFit, any team member can take on a leadership role, depending on the...
What does this mean for your professional services firm and more important for yourself as an individual? Dan Pink introduced the case that mastery, autonomy and purpose are the key drivers for business performance. What does this mean for...
Almost all of the people on TeamFit work on teams, which is not surprising given the platform’s name. We spend a lot of time figuring out what patterns of skills help people to work together. So much of the...
At TeamFit, we regularly survey different industries on skill trends and look at our own platform to see what skills are getting the most use. One of the skills that has been trending over the past five years is...
We know that the most valuable skills for an individual or an organization are the differentiating skills. The skills that make you different from the competition are the ones that give you an edge in winning work and getting...
TeamFit takes an open, bottom up, approach to skills. Anyone can claim a skill and they can call anything they like a skill. This keeps the system open and adaptive and lets new skills and skill terms bubble up...
Most of us use hundreds of different skills in our work. But not all of these skills are equally important. Our research has found that the most important skills for an individual or an organization are differentiating skills. Core...
A simple question, “Can you perform the same role using different skills?” From another perspective, “Can the same skill set be applied to different roles?” Why do these questions matter? How you answer them will say a great deal...
What is the primary role of company leadership in markets characterised by variability, complexity, ambiguity and risk? It is pretty simple really, building capabilities that deliver value to some part of the market. Then taking the revenues from the...
For the past few weeks, I have been in conversations on critical emerging skill sets for different industries. The conversation has ranged from LinkedIn groups (especially Design Thinking), to long e-mail threads, to dips into Twitter and even Facebook....
There has been compelling research evidence reported over the past decade that organizations with high engagement of their people deliver better financial outcomes (e.g. Gallup Sept 2016). This makes intuitive sense. But if we unpack this a little more,...
I spent the weekend of Sept. 9 through 11 at the SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture) Graduate Thesis Weekend. What skills drive success in professional services? Share your insights in this short survey. SCI-Arc is kind of a...
Many of us spend part of our careers as project managers. Learning how to manage a project and get the best out of our people is a foundational learning experience for many of us. It’s a time when we build core...
Back on August 14 Gary Golden wrote a fascinating post on Techcrunch “Why LinkedIn should kill the résumé and replace it with the experience graph.” He makes the basic point that the résumé as it currently exists does not...
At TeamFit, we are carrying out a survey on skills in professional services. Basically we are asking what skills contribute to success today and tomorrow. Please contribute to this survey This has gotten us into many conversations about skills...
Skills are at the center of TeamFit. They are one of the four key things that the platform connects, the others being People, Projects and Roles. Our focus on skills leads some people to ask “How is this different...
Through the summer, we have been hard at work on the design of TeamFit v2. Our users have helped us to rethink some of our earlier design decisions. Users tend to do that. We will post more on these...
“Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.” – Rita Mae Brown, 1988 The words we use are always informed by their histories. They reflect and distill the thoughts and values of a particular time. Words change...
The previous post in this two-part series covered some of the considerations for the formation of cross-functional teams that are tasked with an initiative or a project. In this post, we will discuss challenges and opportunities in the ongoing...
In June our team successfully completed a major piece of work. It was high stakes and high pressure, with a lot of late nights and some pretty intense conflicts. But we made it through and we decided to celebrate...
As a product professional, I’ve had the opportunity over the years to be a member of or leader of cross functional teams. These teams tackled a wide array of issues, typically in project or time-bound committee formats. The matrix...
One of the biggest factors in a company’s success is also one of the hardest to acquire. According to a recent leadership survey, 46 percent of companies stated that leadership skills were the most difficult to find in an...
Value-based pricing is a strategic tactic where setting price is based on the benefits your service or product provides to your customers. It is the ability to charge based on the value you offer. On the other hand, cost-based...
A high-performance team is often characterized as one that is aligned and committed to a common purpose. The people on the team have roles with complementary skills. Most importantly, they show high levels of collaboration and innovation to produce...
Commoditization = Profit Erosion The greatest threat to professional services companies is commoditization. Firms that offer the same services, delivered in the same way, at the same level of quality as their competitors will see prices driven down to...
Faster project cycles More diverse teams Pressure to perform Professional services are evolving rapidly, and with it the tools and systems we use to deliver are changing as well. There has been no change in the fundamentals. It is...
What skills differentiate you from people in your profession? What skills do you have that surprise you? In my twenties I worked mostly on my own. I was what we call today a ‘sole contributor.’ I did a variety...
It is hard to really know how skilled another person is. The only real way to do this is to work with them on a series of projects and follow the results of the work over time. Even then...
In a recent Entrepreneur article, contributor Matt Straz wrote, “Almost half of the companies that participated in the Workplace Trends’ Global Workforce Leadership Survey in February and March 2015 chose leadership as the hardest skill to find in employees. What’s more, among...
TeamFit is adding a new tool to its platform in June, project pulse. This is a simple way to ask people on a team how a project is going. Later on we will extend this so that people can...
While purpose in the workplace is imperative, leaders are potentially overlooking its significance to the overarching health of our civilization. My experience and research suggest purpose ought to be the objective, but it is the misalignment of the personal,...
Knowledge workers are often biased towards skills that rest in the mind and are expressed through language. That is language broadly defined, to include math and coding, conversations and negotiations … things that happen mostly in our heads. Looking...
We have been carrying out a simple one-question survey that asks the following question: “What categories do you use to organize your skills? Please pick the top five categories that you use to organize your skills. You may want...
We have almost 2,000 unique skills on TeamFit. That may seem like a lot, but one company we are talking with has more than 9,000! And some individuals on TeamFit have as many as 200 different skills, all rated...
“The best leading indicator of the success of a B2B SaaS company is user engagement.” Boston VC in Conversation User engagement can predict future success. So how should we be measuring engagement? This is a frequent topic of conversation...
We all talk about big data these days. Never before have we had access to so much data from so many sources. In TeamFit’s world, we are bringing in data from many, many different systems and then blending this...
What conversations do you have about skills in your company? There are three that matter. And if you are not having these conversations you are putting your company at risk. What skills lead to our winning work? What skills...
We are doing a deep dive on how people are measuring project success. Before reading on, it would be great if you could take our short survey! Thank you. Predicting Project Success As we got out and talked to...
We only get better by measuring our performance. We all know this. Top athletes practice it. The best professionals take time for reflection. Business teams track KPIs. So why doesn’t our team building and project management software platforms do this?...
I enjoyed reading Josh Bersin’s predictions for 2016. As he says, we are in a bold new world where everything in the area of talent and HR is changing or being fundamentally disrupted. Josh’s research is always top notch...
Every team changes over time. Some teams just keep on getting better. Some shoot up rapidly only to crash and crater out. Others take a long time to find their footing but once they do they flourish. The model...
I am a big fan of Roger Martin’s cascading choices. A must-know for anyone involved in driving business growth. The choices cascade from an organization’s aspirations, to Where to Play and How to Win and then asks what Capabilities...
Sketching is a pretty valuable skill. It is one of the best ways to capture ideas, explore connections and communicate our thoughts and feelings. It is a core design skill. Maybe it should be seen as a core business...
Most of us work on a lot of projects. Projects for customers, internal projects, side projects that engage our interests and help us to grow. Please take our little survey on What Skills Are Relevant in 2016? In the project,...
Automation of knowledge work, platforms to connect freelance knowledge workers, cost cutting at major companies and the development of internal consulting services will all put professional services firms under pressure in 2016. Please take our short survey What skills are...
Most of us work on more than one thing at a time. I am not just talking about the multiple projects we take on at work. At TeamFit I generally have three or four projects running at any one...
Skills are not evenly distributed. They are not even normally distributed! There is now good research support for the idea that skills distribution follows a power law and not a bell curve. For a good summary see Josh Bersin’s...