Skills gap analysis

I have spent some years managing projects only to be moved into the marketing dept of a specialised technical company.
I took one thing with me when I moved (kicking and screaming into the plush office and car).
That was the need to have or be able to acquire the necessary skills set for ALL aspects of the project in prospect.
It's too late when the bear is on your tail to discover that you don't have the means to deal with it.
So, my first step was to talk to all the areas that I had determined would be needed to complete the WHOLE job - guys to dig holes, girls to photocopy (you just knew I was old and non-PC didn't you!)and all the appropriately skilled programmers/hardware people and assembly staff.
Only then would I consider bidding and how the job would impact on us.
Don't forget if you have to buy in or subcontract elements of a job you don't control the costs totally. I mean by this that you can't legislate for the impact a late element coming in from outside will have on your internal timings and costs.

Nuff said - back to the garden!!

Our shop only employs 2 full-time developers other than myself (the owner). Our SGA is done during hiring. After that, the team has to be able to do anything and everything required on a given software project. We do it as a team of at least two, sometimes three. During hiring, our candidates have to write -- yes, during the interview -- an n-tier application with a small scope. I want to know if they can sink or swim up front, and since we don't have the luxury of a beefy team of specialists, we tend to heir young, enthusiastic renaissance people. MFW

We received this feedback via e-mail from member Mike Malesevich:

"This may be a bit off-topic, but I believe that the HR department should
maintain the base of information regarding employee knowledge and training,
along with all the other employee related data.

When an employee is initially hired, hopefully, the job specified what
skills were required and this individual fit that description. If that
person takes additional courses, these should also be included in the HR
information. This would apply to every employee in every department. In
this manner, you would only need to search the central HR data for the
required skill sets, etc., rather than developing and maintaining an
Information Technology/Information Systems (IT/IS) departmental base of
data.

There are many skilled 'user department' employees who know how to use MS
Word, Excel, Access, SQL, C++, etc. - why limit this skills inventory to
IT/IS only. If a project requires expertise that may be in short supply or
non-existent in IT/IS, why not use anyone in the company.

I have used people from other departments (accounting, marketing, etc.) for
short time periods who have skill sets that were not readily available from
IT/IS, and found that it worked well. These 'outsiders' got a chance to see
what really goes on in application development, this helped built better
intra-departmental relationships (after negotiating for the borrowed
employee), and distributed some knowledge throughout the company.

After all, what does HR stand for?"