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Does Your Staff Have the Skills to Succeed?

By Esther Shein

When food and beverage maker Welch's was preparing to deploy a complicated Oracle ERP system, the IT group responsible for the implementation wanted to make sure their staff had the right skills needed for the job. Wayne Lemmerhirt, former group manager of applications development at Welch's, in Concord, Mass., held a series of meetings with his direct reports and identified four different sets of necessary skills, tools and languages. When matched against each IT employee, the resulting matrix clearly showed which staff member had which talents.

Next, the managers rated the people for each skill on a scale from one to five, says Lemmerhirt now a partner with OnDemand Services, a managed services consultancy in Burlington, Mass. The team also included such non-technical areas as leadership and project management skills. The result was a clear picture of each employee's talents, enabling Lemmerhirt and his team to pinpoint which skills were missing and to decide whether to train existing employees or hire outside consultants.

What's In Your Talent Warehouse?
Making sure you have the right talent in-house is important for several reasons. It ensures not only that project implementations will go smoother but that you can anticipate your long-term needs, manage any skills gap and reduce the enterprise risk associated with IT business initiatives.

"Knowing what you have in-house, who the people are and the skills they have is a terrific way of managing and mitigating enterprise-level risk associated with information technology," says Diane Morello, a vice president and fellow at IT research and advisory firm Gartner, Inc., in Stamford, Conn. (article continues)

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