Project Purpose
The purpose of the skills matrix was to find out where people’s skills are lacking and where we need to improve. This would then guide us to understanding what each team member needs to work on. If someone’s skill level for a particular skill was low, but the target level was high, that would tell us that there is a large skill gap there, so that would need priority as a skill that needs to be improved.
Planning
In this task, I needed to gather data from everyone in my team. This would be put into an Excel spreadsheet and would cover specific skills such as, technical skills, power skills and data subjects. These were split into three groups so we could break up and define scores for each individual area, and it also makes it easier when filtering, if we wanted to look at specific groups. The raw data in Excel also included fields such as current level, target level, skills gap, date, role, and team member. The date column was needed in case we would be filling in an updated version of the data at a later date. We included ‘Skill Gap’ so we can clearly see how big the skill gap was looking for each skill, instead of working it out manually.
First Stages
The first stages were deciding what information I was going to collect. Collaboratively, I and another person in my team determined the levels (we decided on 0-3) and how these would be described. We decided that 0 = none, 1 = basic, 2 = intermediate, 3 = proficient. I then created the template in Excel, laying out the columns in chronological order. I put each team member’s names down one column and matched them up so that the number of names matched with the number of competencies.
As you can see, the name is copied down to cover every competence. The column next to that states what group the competence is from. Once the template was filled in, I moved on to constructing an email. I needed to ensure that I stated the purpose of this project, as well as clear and direct instruction of what I needed everyone to do. I made sure to think about what fields I needed filled in such as ‘Current Level’ and ‘Target Level’ and what they should base their personal scoring on. This way everyone would be judging themselves following the same criteria and guidelines. Once the data was collected, I was ready to move it into Power BI, where I would turn it into a visual based report that would make my information easy to read and help us understand where improvements are needed.
Working on my Own
It was interesting running this whole project myself, as it gave me a chance to put my planning and communication to the test. There were moments, for example, where I would send out emails to people to make sure all participants had entered the data that I needed. Normally, these emails would have been sent out for me by another team member, so that I wouldn’t need to do it. It was a nice challenge to have the responsibility of delivering each aspect of the project. Not only did I plan it all myself, but I also did all the doing. I learnt more about how best to communicate with people and was also able to develop my technical skills in Power BI.
Challenges
A few notable challenges came up along the way, these were mostly practical issues brought up through Powe BI, since around 75% of the project was set working in that programme. The first big problem I noticed, was with my original idea to have a page for each team member. I realised how impractical this was due to the number of pages it added up to and I also realised that the page navigation system now looked silly because of all the buttons lined up.
Solving Problems
To solve this problem, I decided that I would learn how to create a dropdown page navigation system! It took a few online tutorials to figure this out, but in the end, I figured out that the best way was to create a table of all the pages and include a second column with numbers 1 to however many pages there were. Then apply this table to a slicer and add a ‘Go’ button to select after deciding the page you want to go to. The only issue I had once this was created was that the alphabetical order of the pages was incorrect, this didn’t take me long to fix, however. This is how it was looking after the dropdown was put in. It was much cleaner.
In the end, after developing my report, I created a new page that I could use as an individual team member view just by selecting a filter. This meant that I no longer needed all the separate pages since this would be used as a way to combine them into just one. Soon after, I disposed of the dropdown page navigation and brought it back to separate buttons like it was before. Thought I may as well because I didn’t have a crazy number of pages to display anymore.
Acting on Feedback
Later on in the project, I received feedback to include a page for each group displaying the percentages of the skill levels for each team member for each competence. Within the idea process for this I concluded using a 100% graph to portray this request. I made each skill level a distinct colour, red being 0 and blue being 3.
Using the Results to make Decisions
When looking at the finished product, it was fun to put my system of drilling through to practice and look at how many people were in each level on the competencies. Through this, I discovered that in the skill Power Query: 2 people (22%) were on red, 2 people (22%) were on yellow, 4 people (44%) were on green, and 1 person (11%) was on blue. As an example, we can see 4 people would need to work on this skill in order to be on level 2. Since that is just under half, it may be worth setting up a workshop on Power Query.