Meet Skillz 2.0
Last month I had posted an article on Skillz 1.0, here and at my personal blog site, under category Skillz, explaining the challenges faced in the project "Skillz", and how we solved it. These challenges grew in number and size as we moved forward. The Skillz 2.0 is expected to be ready for launch by anywhere around mid of March, after thorough review, testing, bug fixing and demonstration videos. There were many cycles of thought-process and discussion before we nailed down the specs and sketched the roadmap for Skillz 2.0. This had already started prior to release 1.0. The effort was to take Skillz to next level - nearer to "Performance" = ("Talent Management" + "Performance Management"), that I had discussed in my previous article on Skillz. The new Skillz required some major changes in its architecture to allow measuring performance. We also got several feedback that contributed to Skillz 2.0. We got our own HR & Finance heads involved to figure out the smallest beads required, to be roped into Skillz to make it more effective and generic.
Here I would like to discuss few new things introduced which took Skillz to next level of perfection. The two new modules added in this release are "Activities" and "Assessment", beside several restructuring and fine tuning to the existing modules.
Activity:
Activities in Skillz are, by definition "Any task which can be assessed for its performance.". In general any organization doing business would have certain activities associated with it, that forms the core of its business. These activities can take various forms like project, department, interview, research and many more. Activities require certain skills and people who are associated to it on a time basis. Every activity further, has an owner who is is a user responsible for the said activity and users who are performing any particular role in that activity within the activity's time limits. Activities can be nested, which means that an activity can have sub activity with an owner associated. Owners are allowed to create further sub-activities, however, they do not have access to their parent activities. In general the activity tree resembles somewhat an organizational chart. Few typical activity screens are shown below:
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General attribute of an Activity.
On the left, are the general attributes of an activity with an option to schedule the starting or closing dates for an activity. An activity might be planned before it starts which requires a scheduler to handle it. It can be manually started using the "Start Now" option. |
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Parent-Child relationship of Activities.
Activities can be nested. The screen on the left, allows you to do so. An owner can create and manage a sub activity. An owner has a complete ownership of all child activities.
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Associating Skillset to an Activity.
Any Activity requires a set of skills to run. The system responds with showing users a tree of skillset groups and skillset to choose from. The skillset chosen forms the base for users who can be associated to the activity. Only those users, having these skillset can be assigned to the activity. |
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Activity weightage:
Weightage for an activity denotes its importance as seen by the business based on several parameters, like region, type, criticality etc. These parameters allows Skillz to rank activities and measure/assess the activities more accurately during activity assessment.
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Assessment:
Every activity has people associated with it, who are in-turn having the required skills and having a defined role in that activity, for certain time period. Every skillset has a value-range, which is used to define the bounds for the ratings. The user associated to that skill are rated with a value belonging to that value-range. The managers or owners of an activity use these value-range to rate the users in the activity for his role played in the activity.
An assessement migth be carried out for a single activity or a group of activities. It also has weightage associated with it which is a matrix of "Skillset", "Job-Role" and "Weightage". This typically reduces the scope of assessment being biased. These assessments are further, archived by Skillz for analytics.
A typical assessment screen would look like this:
An activity migth be continuous in nature. Further, it is not necessary that an assessment is carried out after the activity is over. Hence, Skillz allows you to assess any activity within a time interval in which it exists !!Sigh!! (was not that easy to design and code). The assessment "from" and "to" defines the timeline for which the assessment is to be carried out. The response "start" and "end" date defines the owners responsibility to complete the assessment not before start date and not after end date.
I will keep adding more as it comes ... for now see ya soon ... bye!