As with Organisation Design and Career Path Design, Work, Role and Competency Definition and Profiling has been one of our flagship products over the past 16 or more years. In fact, we have created a complete “framework” of competency information for the disciplines of IT, Digital, Sales, Engineering and Finance – including Agile competencies. We use this information in the process of defining Work, Roles and Competencies.
Back in 1993, Edward E Lawler of the Center for Effective Organisations wrote an article published in Harvard Business Review titled, “From Job-based to Competency-based Organisations”. This was prophetic. Right now, this move is becoming more and more apparent in organisations, especially those looking to become more dynamic and flexible to meet the challenges of Industry 4.0 and the New Way of Working.
Job based organisations focus on defining jobs and then fitting people to the job. In the New Way of Working, individuals add value to the extent that they are adaptable. Selection is now based on the ability of the individual to learn, unlearn, and relearn rapidly.
Changing needs of users, technology improvements, and broadening market places require consistent upskilling and reskilling for organisations to remain competitive. The trend is for organisations to become increasingly flatter. This means decreasing management layers, which increases the requirement for individuals to take responsibility for their own performance.
In the New Way of Working, we have what we call “Roles” as opposed to jobs. In this definition of Role, we refer to a single outcome or deliverable (eg. Design, or Code, or Test), with it’s related Competencies.
Each Role is defined with its required competencies. In the New Way of Working, people are generally required to perform more than one Role in their work, and the combinations of “Roles” in the “job” change as needs change. “Jobs” then become flexible, depending on the Roles needed to be played by team members at the time.
We equate these “Roles” to lego blocks, which can be used to create one form, then broken down and reused in a different form. Roles, in this basic definition, are the fundamental building blocks of the Reconfigurable Organisation.
This is generally very specific to an organisation. We do, however, have a database of information on work and competencies for well over 550 different roles in IT, Digital, Finance, and Sales environments – including information for all the Agile positions. We use this information, together with input from key people in your organisation, to enable us to work quickly, professionally, and in line with general standards in the industry to ensure that your profiles are complete, accurate, properly articulated, and ready to use for all People related activities, including Recruitment, Development, Performance Management and Workforce and Succession Planning.
If you need to review your Role Profiles, especially if you are going through one of the Big 5 Transformations, please fill in the form below and we will be in touch directly. Alternative, make an appointment to discuss your requirements with us.
See also information at Designing Reconfigurable Organisations, and Career Path Design and Implementation.