WisHList Newsletter September 2008

Content list

IT skills: where have all the good ones gone?

IT consulting skills are as scarce as the proverbial hen’s teeth. Not only do the tertiary institutions not deliver enough trained people, but the international demand for skills makes IT professionals imminently marketable. “Dubai is one of hungriest IT skills markets, offering very attractive opportunities for talented people”, says WisHList’s Neville Levinthal.

In Neville’s experience, the general IT skills shortage is heightened in the consulting environment for a few reasons:

  • Young people sometimes regard development work as a less exciting branch of the IT field.
  • The field has a unique work ethic that doesn’t suit everybody. “Consultants spend most of their time at clients’ offices. They have to be disciplined and self-motivated and understand the importance of behaving professionally at all times”, explains Neville.
  • Mobility and transport are significant barriers. An IT consultant serves a number of clients and has to have the means to get to them. Young people often don’t have their own cars and our public transport system is not the most efficient and reliable. The logistics of being a consultant can be an insurmountable hurdle.

Faced with these difficulties, Wishlist adopted a creative approach to attracting consultants. “We decided to stop fishing in the limited existing local pond”, says Neville. “Instead we are grooming and growing our own skills, supplemented with international recruitment.”

WisHList now invests significant resources in assessing and growing young consultants, rather than relying on attracting experienced skills. The company recruits young graduates and put them through an intensive battery of tests to assess their skills, knowledge and, most importantly, personal suitability to the consulting field. Only those who display the necessary potential and aptitude to grow into the WisHList way of doing things are appointed.

Neville is very satisfied with the results of the process to date. “We have found some good people and all the indications are that the investment is paying off. Of course we know that we won’t retain all our recruits, but we are happy to become known as a source of excellent skills and an employer of choice for talented youngsters.”

When it comes to skilling up, WisHList firmly believes that companies cannot get away anymore with not investing in people. “All industry participants have to generate their own resource pools to be sustainable. Our model is not the Holy Grail, but it seems to be working for us.”

To see the model in practice, read “A skills success story”.

PM power tips: How to pick your project team

The issue of skills is not only important when it comes to recruiting and retaining software developers and consultants. The right combination of personalities and capabilities is crucial for project management success. Not all organisations and projects are the same, but if you keep these broad principles in mind, your project team should be a happy, productive place to be.

The PAC Principle

Whenever possible, you want to make sure you have the right people on your team. They are the ones who:

  • want to be on the project,
  • have the necessary skills to appropriately complete the project, and
  • have the time available to focus on the job at hand.

This is known as the PAC Principle: Passion, Ability and Capacity.

The Renaissance Project Member

Software development project leaders often assume that they need a project team of specialists. Despite the obvious advantage of having all the bases covered, there are a few problems with this approach:

  • The "bus factor" goes way up. The bus factor is the measure of how reliant a team is on the knowledge held by only one person, i.e. what would happen if George got hit by a bus.
  • Having a lot of specialists also results in plenty of potential bottlenecks because all
  • tasks of a certain kind have to be done by one or a few people, so at certain points in the project certain people are really busy and others are twiddling their thumbs. In other words, the project team has a very bad capacity balance.
  • Finally, the more specialists you have on your project team, the more likely is the need for several handoffs, where one person can only take the job so far before handing it off to someone else to finish. This not only results in extra paperwork, it also creates communication barriers.

The answer lies in the concept of the generalising specialist which, simply stated, is a jack-of-all-trades and master of some. These are individuals that have a few specialisations at which they are very good, but have the ability in several others to do a sufficient job. The advantages of a team of generalising specialists are numerous:

  • You are not reliant on one or a few people to do a particular task, which allows the team to shift around and put all hands on deck to do whatever tasks are important at the time.
  • The team is well-rounded and needs fewer intermediate handoffs.
  • The team is more likely to be innovative and high performing, as it consists of people who are willing to learn new things and expand their horizons.

In the next edition of WWW we’ll look at how you should structure your organisation to support successful project teams.

Wishing Well

"Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them... and then, the opportunity to choose."
- C. Wright Mills -

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