TeamFit provides economic value by making projects more successful. A lot of good things flow from project success. Stronger customer relationships are the most important and have the biggest long-term economic impact. With strong customer relationships come more repeat...
Some professional services firms are proud that they use only employees for projects. They think that this is the best way to control quality, deliver consistency and optimize utilization. Other firms are making a strategic choice in favor of...
I don’t always know when I need help. I think that is true of most of us. We work hard on our projects. We are down in the weeds, moving forward towards our deadlines, deliverables and goals. Sometimes we...
I have a confession to make and it’s probably best just to come out with it… The X-Factor is one of my guilty pleasures. There I’ve said it. If you are not familiar with this hugely successful piece of...
I’ve been following SPI (Service Performance Insight) Research for sometime and I would recommend their research and materials for anyone involved in leading strategy and execution within a professional services organization. Last week, I had the pleasure of hearing Dave...
When I was managing a professional services organization I sometimes felt like the Cat in the Hat! It was fun as long as long as I kept everything balanced but sometimes things would come crashing down. ‘Look at...
TeamFit should be used by anyone who wants a deeper understanding of their own skills and the skills of the people they work with. The most common way this information is used is to find people for teams and...
Good companies have skill gaps. One default response is to see this as a recruiting problem that HR can solve with more and better recruiting. But this is wrong. A skills gap is in essence an operations problem, one...
Smart business leaders are concerned with talent and the skills available to deliver on strategy. Smarter leaders want to have a skills gap. Why? Ask yourself why you might not have a skills gap. Your business is mature, you...
There has been a lot of debate recently on how to gather skills data. At many companies these are part of annual (or quarterly) performance reviews. One large Vancouver engineering firm requires employees to update skill information as part...
Professional services companies can only win on the basis of differentiation. What does differentiation mean? You have an impact on some specific aspect of your client’s business that no other firm can deliver. That is it. Sounds simple, but...
Running a company is like being the captain of a ship. You need to have direction, chart a course, and you need to have a crew to help you reach your destination. Having a good map is critical. Maps...
We all have the talent religion. We talk about our people as our most important asset, we say we invest in our people, and we stay up nights thinking about engagement. None of this is enough. To win in...
Skill in building teams is a critical competency in today’s world of team-based work. It is not an easy thing to do. Too often we bring together a group of people that we think will be able to work...
Teams are central to how we work. Most of us work on teams. In fact, most of us work on several teams at any one time. How people get assigned to teams is a critical to performance. At TeamFit...
Some of the world’s top professional services companies are phasing out traditional performance reviews and staff rankings. For many years these were central to how these companies managed their staff, decided on promotions and bonuses. “Performance is an ongoing...
Applying the right skills at the tight time is critical to ensure health of your service business. I get to speak with many different professional service organizations (PSOs) every week. What I hear over and over again is that...
What are the most important skills to think about when it comes to building relationships with clients? I did a quick straw poll with a half dozen business leaders at professional services organizations. The responses came in three buckets:...
Unit economics are critical to understanding how your business will scale. They tell you which levers to pull to improve performance. There has been a lot of good work on unit economics for subscription businesses (see for example David...
Goal-oriented, driven and well trained – this is who we are as MBAs. In a sense, we are like Everest climbers – we take risks, work hard and rely on our capabilities to make it. But how do we...
Many of us like to claim a lot of skills. Active users on the TeamFit platform typically claim 50 or more skills, and most people have the maximum 50 listed on their LinkedIn profiles. The typical project on TeamFit,...
Skills are the tools we use when we work with each other. Too often we look at our skills in isolation from the people we work with. But in fact it is the combination of skills that let’s us...
Last month, KPCB’s Mary Meeker presented KPCB’s 2015 Internet Trends report and what a treasure trove it is. One trend that Meeker commented on was the “re-imagining of enterprise computing” which is now “changing business process one segment at...
At TeamFit, we spend a lot of time talking to people who build teams, team managers, and team members. And we dig deep into how each of these people thinks about the skills they have and the skills of...
The default owner of data generated by human resources management systems of all kinds should be the individual. Not the company the individual works for. Not the platform through which the data is collected. Given today’s work practices, this...
HR professionals and project managers constantly seek the most effective way to understand and assess people’s skills. We are all under more and more economic pressure to be competitive. Companies are dependent on the skills of their people to...
At TeamFit, we are deep into the design and development of our TeamBuilder module. TeamBuilder is used to find the best people for a team and will be released later in June. So we have been talking to a...
Recently, CB Insights has published a series of blog posts about companies and industries being fundamentally disrupted (they use the term “unbundled”) by a brace of start-ups. These startups not only threaten large incumbents, they are unlocking enormous value...
High performance teams take risks. They take calculated risks, but real risks that can have bad outcomes. And consistently taking risks, and making sure that enough of those risks pay off, requires trust. When was the last time you...
I’ve been speaking to many firms over the last few months to get a better understanding of how companies that live on service revenues are managing and optimizing the allocation of people to teams. And as part of this,...
LinkedIn executed on an important strategic decision this month (May 2015). As it had announced well in advance (no one can claim they were taken by surprise by this), it closed off access to its platform to all but...
Based on a conversation with Dan Ronald, VP Product Management at Optigo Networks It was a rare sunny spring day in Vancouver’s when I met with Dan Ronald in search of new insights into team performance. Dan is an experienced...
Do you teams have the ability to bounce back? A lot can go wrong over the course of a project. There can be unexpected technology challenges, delays caused by change at the customer, people can leave teams for all...
Most of us think we know ourselves pretty well. We think we know what our skills are and how we apply them. But there is a lot of research that says this is not so and that we don’t...
Companies today are dependent on the skills of their talent to get work done. In an era of big data, machine learning and proprietary algorithms we rely more than ever on the skills of people working together to get...
In February we published a post and started a survey on the contingent economy. The contingent economy refers to the move by many companies to reduce dependence on full-time workers and to increase the use of contract workers. Many...
Big data, data analytics, predictive analytics, data visualization … these are all emerging as critical skill sets at many companies. Ten years ago a lot of us were busy pulling together our data into data warehouses and layering on...