Ibbaka

View Original

Your skill network is an interlocking set of circles

When we first got started with TeamFit we began with the notion of teams, and the idea that modern companies are best understood as teams of teams.

Most people work on multiple teams at any one time and the teams can (and often should) overlap. At the heart of teams are the personal relationships we form with our teammates.

When we began to analyze our data, we realized that there were important patterns in how people work together and the skill combinations they use over and over again. We are beginning to surface these in various part of the user interface.

Here is the basic view on the person tab, showing the people I work with most often. In my case, it is the core TeamFit team. The lines between people show how often they work together and by tapping on each person I can quickly see what skills they have. Above I have clicked on TeamFit CTO Lee Iverson. Below is what I see when I tap on our COO Karen Chiang.

Of course, I may be interested in Karen who I work with most frequently. It is interesting to see some new faces show up here.

Each of us has different work networks and in fact the skills of the people we work with are one way we amplify our own skills. I could not do the work I do without close interactions with the other people on the TeamFit team.

Two of the key people driving innovation at TeamFit are Gregory Ronczewski (UX) and David Botta (Data Analysis and Visualization). TeamFit gives me a quick way to see how they are connected, what their skills are.

Above we can see Gregory's Skills and People views. Below David's.

These two people work closely together and it is interesting to see that they both have the skill Design Thinking in common. They also have important non-technical skills, in Gregory's case Active Listening and in David's case Honesty. Anyone who has worked with either of these people would endorse these.

Top down competency models do not capture the interplay of how skills and relationships connect people across their working lives. One can use the Skill Graph (TeamFit's underlying data model and data) to build a dynamic competency model, but abstracted from the real world of relationships and connections these models don't really help us understand how people work together, what skills they need to succeed on specific teams and their potential. Our goal at TeamFit is to support all these of these:

Understand people, their skills and relationships
Build better teams
Uncover and encourage potential

We are now bringing people onboard TeamFit version 2. Reach out to us if you are interested.