Skill management in retained organizations

3.12.2012 itSMF Kongress Kassel

Skill Management in Retained Organizations Hans-Christian Boos (@boosc, boos@arago.de)

• What can go wrong when you do not actively deal with people?

• Stop managing skill, start managing talent.

• A talent based delivery partnership.

• Talent management means standardizing along knowledge.

Agenda

Outsourcing can be done for many wrong reasons, but in the end it does not matter. Once a deal is there, you will have to make the best of it.

Your people are the key factor in making any deal a successful relationship.

When you approach the topic of people the wrong way inneversable action will be taken – mostly beyond your influence.

You need to be aware of the consequences.

Good people may turn their backs on you, just because there are rumours about your retained organisation. The good guys are the first to leave, and they do so preemptively.

Make sure you communicate up front what you want and who you are looking for.

Setting up or communicating the wrong roles in your retained organisation will slow your outsourced entities down.

For example, if you make your current operators governours without telling them that they are not supposed to „google“ their way through incident telcos.

Because certain knowledge is needed at the insourcer you may be forced to move key people over to your insourcer.

Generally this is good, because good people will find better opportunities for their IT skills in a „real“ IT organization, but – bluntly – it also holds the danger of you keeping the dead wood.

Summary: Bad things that happen with people

The good guys leave preemptively, because you failed to communicate about their future.

People have no clue what their new job actually is, so they do their old one and make things unbearably complicated.

Your best knowledge goes to the insourcer and as outsourcer you are left with the dead wood.

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• What can go wrong when you do not actively deal with people?

• Stop managing skill, start managing talent.

• A talent based delivery partnership.

• Talent management means standardizing along knowledge.

Agenda

Look at the core skills needed for your core tasks. Tere will be clusters for

1. Governance people

2. Architects

3. Commercial people

4. …

The technical skill is not essential

What you are really looking for is talent.

Because

1. Talent attracts talent

2. Talent can learn missing skills

3. Talent is engaged and committed

Talent, what people do to get “it” and make “it” stay!

If you are feeling tense at Google… you can go and get a massage…..

At W.L. Gore the staff elect their CEO to avoid the Peter Principle…

A movie suggested to us that being able to hold your drink will get you a good engineering job at facebook…

And as a CEO of a hot startup in Berlin you spend your day in a coffee shop chatting….

Talent – Why we need it so badly in retained organizations

Jobs with great perspective, jobs that developed countries have to offer need brains, not bodies!

Unfortunately brains and bodies are not always connected… And we no longer just need the bodies, so we have to attract the brains…

To avoid misunderstanding:

We need brains, because we need results. Thus the brains we want to attract need to produce results…

The 1st law of behavioral physics tells us:

Brains do not create results upon request

Conclusion:

It is an economic necessity to create environments to increase the likelihood of good results from brains

So stop thinking like a HR planner when thinking about your retained organization.

Think about your retained organization as a startup that has exactly one year to be successful but is fortunate enough to be able to hire from a pool of experienced people.

• What can go wrong when you do not actively deal with people?

• Stop managing skill, start managing talent.

• A talent based delivery partnership.

• Talent management means standardizing along knowledge.

Agenda

YOU

THEM

YOU

THEM

BUSINESS / GOVERNANCE

YOU

THEM

BUSINESS / GOVERNANCE

LIFECYC

LE, A

RC

HITEC

TUR

E, O

PTIM

IZATION

YOU

THEM

BUSINESS / GOVERNANCE

SERVICE MANAGEMENT (all things ITIL, but PLEASE make them agile and build an API for

them)

LIFECYC

LE, A

RC

HITEC

TUR

E, O

PTIM

IZATION

YOU

THEM

BUSINESS / GOVERNANCE

SERVICE MANAGEMENT (all things ITIL, but PLEASE make them agile and build an API for

them)

TECH- NOLOGY

STACK (from data center to regulatory

license)

LIFECYC

LE, A

RC

HITEC

TUR

E, O

PTIM

IZATION

YOU

THEM

BUSINESS / GOVERNANCE

SERVICE MANAGEMENT (all things ITIL, but PLEASE make them agile and build an API for

them)

TECH- NOLOGY

STACK (from data center to regulatory

license)

OPERATING

LIFECYC

LE, A

RC

HITEC

TUR

E, O

PTIM

IZATION

YOU

THEM

BUSINESS / GOVERNANCE

SERVICE MANAGEMENT (all things ITIL, but PLEASE make them agile and build an API for

them)

TECH- NOLOGY

STACK (from data center to regulatory

license)

OPERATING

AUTOMATION

LIFECYC

LE, A

RC

HITEC

TUR

E, O

PTIM

IZATION

Let the horse do the running!

i.e. let the outsourcer do the IT. You need to focus on saying what it is you need.

People who can say that and do QA on that are the ones you need!

These people are not lone super heroes!

They are extremely adaptable, motivated team players.

They are core talent!

And you do not need 10.000 of them. If your „process“ seems to make that necessary, rethink your rules!

• What can go wrong when you do not actively deal with people?

• Stop managing skill, start managing talent.

• A talent based delivery partnership.

• Talent management means standardizing along knowledge.

Agenda

You can pack up your process whip!

Processes exist to lubricate interaction between different skill sets, not as a firewall or blame whip!

If you want to be the boss of your outsourced IT, you need knowledge and the ability to generate new knowledge or ask for it if your business requries so!

Factual Knowledge

Describes the IT landscape, architecture and regulatory checkpoints in a rough sketch.

Factual knowledge has a medium to low volatility and a degree of incorrectness.

A

A

R

R

R

R

R

S

S

S

S

S

S

M

M

M

M

M

Actionable Knowledge

Actions that can be executed or need to be executed in certain situations.

These “knowledge items” are connected though their expression I/O scheme, i.e. a block’s possible output expressions connect to the next block’s possible input expressions. The weight of a connection is determined by the degree of data congruency.

Situational Knowledge

The most volatile knowledge describing the current situation or other time dependent data of parts of the IT model.

In a typical environment situational knowledge is obtained from monitoring systems, service management dash boards or data busses.

The skills you probably wanted to manage are just pieces of knowledge now.

And we have gone full circle, you can take off now! If you can standardize along knowledge, you will need to manage talent in your retained organization in terms of: 1. Governance 2. Architecture 3. Optimization 4. Change

Management 5. Knowledge

acquisition

Thank you for your time which we hope was well invested, because dismissing good ideas can harm your future