Gregory Ronczewski leads the design of the TeamFit platform – view his profile on TeamFit Google’s web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996. To convert the backlink data that it gathered for a given web page...
Gregory Ronczewski leads the design of the TeamFit platform – see his profile on TeamFit The Olympus OM40 was my first “real” camera. I carried it everywhere. It was perfect. Soon I started to experiment with all the settings. Shutter...
Gregory Ronczewski leads the design of the TeamFit platform A Russian nesting doll, or “matryoshka” is a set of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another. When I think about a skill I often wonder: is...
“Differentiate for your clients, not from your competitors” Understanding strategic differentiation is critical to the leaders of professional services companies. In a hyper-competitive world, companies without differentiation quickly find themselves pushed down into commoditized roles where it is hard...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
“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...
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...
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...
Read also Part 1: TeamFit One Year Later Part 1 – What We’ve Learned “In the end, you have to choose whether or not to trust someone.” Sophie Kinsella It was roughly a year ago that I joined and...
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...
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...
Project success rests on three things: goals (and goal alignment); team chemistry (including communication) and the skills of your team. TeamFit is focused on skills, specifically how skills get applied to projects. You can’t build a great team using...
person’s job is to make sure that project teams are built quickly so that the company can start to book the projects it has sold. And as the job title implies, these people are expected to manage resources, that...
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...
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...
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...
You have pulled together a great team for your project. You have the skills needed, people know how their skills complement each other, and you have great connector skills to pull the team together. The team has gelled. You...
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...
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...
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...
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...
A corporate vision is one of the most important aspects of a company. As I talk about in my forthcoming book, corporate vision is the means to visualize your optimal future state of being. It’s what you wish to...
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...
“The P in PM is as much about ‘people management’ as it is about ‘project management’.” – Cornelius Fichtner Project managers must juggle multiple resources to implement projects. They operate under multiple constraints and uncertainties. People’s skills, attitudes and...
Putting a team together is the first challenge to any project. But the challenge does not end there. We all know how difficult it is to get something right the first time, and building a team is no different....
The definition of a team, in a business context, used to be “a group of people with the complementary skills required to complete a task.” But today’s changing workplace requires more than that. Today, a team can be defined...
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...