What is a project? And how does project work demonstrate skills?
TeamFit is built around skills and project teams. Why?
Because our skills are a very powerful way to describe who we are and what we are interests are. A list of my skills and where I have applied them is a more compelling description of what I am capable of than my resume.
TeamFit is a social skills platform that gives companies insight into the true skills they have within their organization and across their extended talent networks.
What! Skills are social? Yes. The only way to really know if you have a skill is to work with other people and apply what you know to actual work. And then have the people you work with tell you what skills you demonstrated and at what level.
In TeamFit, this takes place in the context of a ‘project.’ You create a project record, add people and then interact around skills. The result is a rich picture of the skills used on each project and a grounded assessment what each person is able to do.
But what is a project? I have watched several dozen people sign up for TeamFit over the past few weeks, and a significant number stumble over the word ‘project.’ They wonder what a project is, and who is on the project. Is a ‘job’ a project? How about something one does as a hobby? Who is on the ‘project team’? Just the people who did the work or is a manager or even a customer part of a project?
We have intentionally left this open as different companies and people will want to use TeamFit in different ways.
Some people are using any occasion on which they worked with others and applied their skills as an opportunity to create a record on TeamFit. This is a good strategy as it gives a wide and diverse view of skills.
Others take a narrow view and only record formal projects, keeping project members to people who worked together directly. This approach can also work. It makes it easier to compare projects, apples with apples, and to get a very focused view of project work inside a company.
How do we think about projects inside TeamFit? Basically we think of anything as a project as long as it has these four characteristics:
Time bound (has a start and a finish)
Has goals (there is a purpose)
Involves others (is done by a team)
Uses skills (to accomplish the goals)
One way to think about your job is as a series of projects. This is how the TeamFit team uses TeamFit. Most of the people at TeamFit will have one or two main projects at any one time and two or three supporting projects. We also expect people to be working on side projects outside of the company (people do this anyway, so why not celebrate this, and leverage it into a deeper understanding of skills).
Another approach is to think of each job you have held as a project over the course of your career, with your teammates being the people you have worked with. If you are like most people you have only a hazy recollection of all the projects you have worked on. One reason we are building TeamFit is to give each of us a place to keep a record of all our projects. But most of us remember the jobs we have held. So one quick way to get started with TeamFit is to create each of your past jobs as a project, add in the skills, and invite in the people who can realistically assess your skill level at the time.
Let us know how you think about projects and project work. What does a ‘project’ mean to you?
The head image is from a wonderful post about project work in the classroom. An enchanting read with many great posters on project work by school students.
