Steven Forth is a Co-Founder of TeamFit. See his Skill Profile. Surveys of various types have been a popular tool for people in talent and performance management. So popular that many of us feel surveyed out. I confess that TeamFit...
Gregory Ronczewski leads the design of the TeamFit platform – see his profile on TeamFit When we hear about William Thompson, better known and remembered as Lord Kelvin, absolute temperature and laws of thermodynamics comes to mind. In 1876...
There is a lot fear about the future of work. Will there be enough work to go around? Will these be high quality employment opportunities, low quality service jobs, or tasks done in the gig economy? What kind of...
“The future is here, it is just not evenly distributed.” William Gibson Governments are preparing a massive renewal of infrastructure. In Canada, the government plans to stimulate the economy with a $125 billion infrastructure fund. In the United...
Talent Management looks at you from the outside while Skills Management is looking at you from the inside out. TeamFit is what connects the two. Chuck Hamilton 2017 is shaping up to be the year of ‘skills.’ Everywhere...
Almost all of us have some leadership role to play today. Knowledge workers are generally responsible for their own performance and for supporting their teammates. At TeamFit, any team member can take on a leadership role, depending on the...
At TeamFit, we regularly survey different industries on skill trends and look at our own platform to see what skills are getting the most use. One of the skills that has been trending over the past five years is...
We know that the most valuable skills for an individual or an organization are the differentiating skills. The skills that make you different from the competition are the ones that give you an edge in winning work and getting...
Most of us use hundreds of different skills in our work. But not all of these skills are equally important. Our research has found that the most important skills for an individual or an organization are differentiating skills. Core...
I spent the weekend of Sept. 9 through 11 at the SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture) Graduate Thesis Weekend. What skills drive success in professional services? Share your insights in this short survey. SCI-Arc is kind of a...
Skills are at the center of TeamFit. They are one of the four key things that the platform connects, the others being People, Projects and Roles. Our focus on skills leads some people to ask “How is this different...
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...
In June our team successfully completed a major piece of work. It was high stakes and high pressure, with a lot of late nights and some pretty intense conflicts. But we made it through and we decided to celebrate...
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...
Value-based pricing is a strategic tactic where setting price is based on the benefits your service or product provides to your customers. It is the ability to charge based on the value you offer. On the other hand, cost-based...
Commoditization = Profit Erosion The greatest threat to professional services companies is commoditization. Firms that offer the same services, delivered in the same way, at the same level of quality as their competitors will see prices driven down to...
In a recent Entrepreneur article, contributor Matt Straz wrote, “Almost half of the companies that participated in the Workplace Trends’ Global Workforce Leadership Survey in February and March 2015 chose leadership as the hardest skill to find in employees. What’s more, among...
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,...
Knowledge workers are often biased towards skills that rest in the mind and are expressed through language. That is language broadly defined, to include math and coding, conversations and negotiations … things that happen mostly in our heads. Looking...
We have been carrying out a simple one-question survey that asks the following question: “What categories do you use to organize your skills? Please pick the top five categories that you use to organize your skills. You may want...
We have almost 2,000 unique skills on TeamFit. That may seem like a lot, but one company we are talking with has more than 9,000! And some individuals on TeamFit have as many as 200 different skills, all rated...
“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...
We all talk about big data these days. Never before have we had access to so much data from so many sources. In TeamFit’s world, we are bringing in data from many, many different systems and then blending this...
What conversations do you have about skills in your company? There are three that matter. And if you are not having these conversations you are putting your company at risk. What skills lead to our winning work? What skills...
We are doing a deep dive on how people are measuring project success. Before reading on, it would be great if you could take our short survey! Thank you. Predicting Project Success As we got out and talked to...
We only get better by measuring our performance. We all know this. Top athletes practice it. The best professionals take time for reflection. Business teams track KPIs. So why doesn’t our team building and project management software platforms do this?...
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...
I am a big fan of Roger Martin’s cascading choices. A must-know for anyone involved in driving business growth. The choices cascade from an organization’s aspirations, to Where to Play and How to Win and then asks what Capabilities...
Sketching is a pretty valuable skill. It is one of the best ways to capture ideas, explore connections and communicate our thoughts and feelings. It is a core design skill. Maybe it should be seen as a core business...
Most of us work on a lot of projects. Projects for customers, internal projects, side projects that engage our interests and help us to grow. Please take our little survey on What Skills Are Relevant in 2016? In the project,...
Automation of knowledge work, platforms to connect freelance knowledge workers, cost cutting at major companies and the development of internal consulting services will all put professional services firms under pressure in 2016. Please take our short survey What skills are...
Most of us work on more than one thing at a time. I am not just talking about the multiple projects we take on at work. At TeamFit I generally have three or four projects running at any one...
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...
Managers have to worry about many things. Making revenue and profit numbers, customer satisfaction and their Net Promoter Score, employee engagement, trends that could disrupt their industry … it seems endless. Should skills be on the list? Just how...
Welcome to 2016. We hope you had a great holiday season and are back at work full of hope for the New Year. At TeamFit, we are obsessed with ‘skills.’ We help people understand their own skills and the...
As an organizational effectiveness expert and management coach, I get to learn from many different teams. During the last downturn in the oil patch, I engaged in strategic planning with the leadership team of a business unit in a...
Entering the holiday season, we are looking back on what we have learned over the past year at TeamFit. One of the most important is the role of trust in consulting, success, team performance and building a valued consulting...
Last November we announced a pivot from team collaboration and decision making to team building. Why TeamFit. One more time around the sun is a good time to take stock of how far we have come and where we need...
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...
I don’t always know when I need help. I think that is true of most of us. We work hard on our projects. We are down in the weeds, moving forward towards our deadlines, deliverables and goals. Sometimes we...
Management consultants pride themselves on their ability to use experience and general smarts to have real impact on their clients. Of course they claim a few other differentiators: well tested frameworks to understand business situations and guide decision making;...
I’ve been following SPI (Service Performance Insight) Research for sometime and I would recommend their research and materials for anyone involved in leading strategy and execution within a professional services organization. Last week, I had the pleasure of hearing Dave...
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...
The United States is gearing up toward election time, and that means certain newsworthy changes that affect the economy are used as battleground for the candidates vying for position. One of these topics that has gained heat most recently...
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...
Smart business leaders are concerned with talent and the skills available to deliver on strategy. Smarter leaders want to have a skills gap. Why? Ask yourself why you might not have a skills gap. Your business is mature, you...
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...
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...
Last week, we asked some of the world’s top consultants “What are the skills of a top management consultant?” One of the most intriguing comments came from Duncan Sinclair of Deloitte Canada, who noted the importance of: “Being able...
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...
Some of the world’s top professional services companies are phasing out traditional performance reviews and staff rankings. For many years these were central to how these companies managed their staff, decided on promotions and bonuses. “Performance is an ongoing...
What is it that top management consultants do that has such a big impact? An impact not just on companies and their strategies but also on careers? The textbook answer is that consultants have deep analytic skills. They are...
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...
Last month, KPCB’s Mary Meeker presented KPCB’s 2015 Internet Trends report and what a treasure trove it is. One trend that Meeker commented on was the “re-imagining of enterprise computing” which is now “changing business process one segment at...
At TeamFit, we spend a lot of time talking to people who build teams, team managers, and team members. And we dig deep into how each of these people thinks about the skills they have and the skills of...