Selecting and Preparing a Project Team

The goal of selecting and preparing a project team is to deliver the right resources, against the right projects, at the right time. To achieve this, a project should be carefully staffed with team members ready to contribute at the needed skill levels for the given roles. This does not happen magically, it takes careful preparing and continual adjusting.

Staffing a project team should be a fluidic process of adding and removing people as needed throughout the life cycle. It typically involves gradually adding appropriately skilled people as a project gets defined; making personnel changes as different skills and abilities are needed over the course of the various tracks; and rolling off team members as they complete their planned work.

Typically, a team starts with a few key individuals as the core team. A few senior staff are added to help plan out a solution. These folks often continue as team leads of the various subteams. Additional staff are usually brought on to help develop a solution and are phased off a project typically when there is a high degree of confidence that a solution works and it is subsequently a matter of refining a solution (e.g., typically after the first full functional test in stabilization). By the end of stabilization, a team is typically backed down to the core people plus a deployment team. Some of the people who help develop a solution transition over to other projects to handle subsequent releases/versions of a solution whereas some transition to Operations to help support the deployed solution.

Selecting who to bring on a project and when is based on many tangible as well as subjective factors. The tangible factors include budgetary constraints (we all wish we could afford a whole team of the best and brightest); matching needed skills and proficiencies with available personnel; an organization's desire to provide mentoring or on-the-job training necessitating a mix of senior and junior skilled personnel; and technology complexity. Subjective factors include team cohesiveness, team chemistry, resultant team readiness, development style (e.g., best suited for efforts that are more formal), and leadership.

For the staffing process to be fluidic, a team needs to adopt a means to easily ramp-up and transition personnel onto a project as well as capture lessons learned and collateral from personnel rolling off a project. To do this, a team and each successive subteam need to decide what is the right level of planning and documentation necessary to ensure smooth transitions. Too little transitional material likely means the new personnel will lose time because of a slow start. Too much transitional material likely means the overall project will suffer under the burden of updating and managing this material. Keep in mind that the optimal mix often changes as the teams evolve.

Another intertwined aspect of preparing a project team is assessing their readiness to perform their given tasks, both current and future, as well as their ability to adapt to the changing project environment. The next section discusses a means, called the MSF Readiness Management Discipline, to fine-tune individual readiness up through readiness at the enterprise level.

MSF Readiness Management Discipline

An organization can expend great effort readying a team. Readiness has two components: technical readiness and psychological readiness (e.g., willingness and mental preparedness). As defined within MSF, technical readiness is a measurement of the current state versus the desired state of knowledge, skills, and abilities of individuals and teams within an organization. This measurement is the real or perceived capabilities at any point during the ongoing process of planning, building, and managing solutions.

The MSF Readiness Management Discipline, a core component of MSF, addresses technical readiness. It provides guidance and processes in the areas of assessing and acquiring knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary for solution delivery. It is based on MSF foundational principles and provides guidance for a proactive approach to readiness throughout a solutions life cycle. Together with proven practices, this discipline provides a foundation for individuals, their project teams, and up to the enterprise level to manage readiness, as depicted in Figure 7-3. The additional organizational readiness examples shown in the figure (i.e., process improvement and organizational change management) should be proactively addressed but are outside the focus of this discipline.

Figure 7-3. MSF Readiness Management Discipline related to organizational readiness

As shown in this figure, there are many levels of readiness to consider. Each level builds off anotherstarting with individual readiness that focuses on knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to meet the responsibilities required for each role. As each successive level is traversed, readiness evolves into making sure an organization is poised for strategic initiatives and successful adoption and realization of its technology investments. Given this additive nature, organizations should start by first focusing on addressing individual readiness to assess and affect change to readiness.

The foundational principles, mindsets, and proven practices of MSF as applied to the MSF Readiness Management Discipline are outlined in the following sections. The primary ideals of effective readiness management are highlighted in this section and are referenced throughout this book.

Foundational Principles Applied to Readiness

The MSF foundational principles are cornerstones of the framework's approach. Those principles relating to successful readiness management are highlighted in this section.

Foster Open Communications

By establishing an open learning environment that encourages individuals to take ownership of their skills development, acknowledge and commit to rectifying skill deficiencies, and participate in setting their goals for their learning plans, individuals tend to take greater pride and have a higher drive to succeed and help others. Groups successful in creating this type of open learning environment often have periodic team training sessions where knowledge and learning are both shared and received.

Work Toward a Shared Vision

An understanding of individual team member readiness enables a shared vision to be framed in a context such that every team member grasps what is envisioned for a solution. It also allows for a more realistic understanding of what a team is able to accomplishenabling a more realistic vision and matching expectations.

Empower Team Members

When team members have requisite skills, they are better able to perform their role. As such, they feel more empowered to contribute successfully to delivering a solution. This feeling often leads to higher productivity and creativity as well as team harmony. Typically, if an organization has a good understanding of skills readiness and how it directly benefits an organization, an organization is more willing to provide additional training and skills enhancement activities.

Establish Clear Accountability, Shared Responsibility

Similar to the benefits of empowering team members, better alignment of team member proficiency and role competency usually leads to more accountability (i.e., it is easier to be accountable when you know what you are doing). Good alignment usually also leads to a high degree of confidence across a team. As such, team members are typically more willing to be jointly responsible for a solution.

Deliver Incremental Value

With readiness gaps identified and actively being minimized, team members are able to focus on delivering business value instead of fretting about role mismatches. With role alignment, team members are well suited to understand what needs to be delivered for customers to realize value.

Frequent deliveries mean that smaller portions of a solution are being delivered more often. This provides more learning opportunities for a team to increase their skills. It also helps team leads quickly calibrate team member skills and abilities as well as role and task skill assumptions, and if necessary, make staffing changes early on in the life cycle.

Stay Agile, Expect and Adapt to Change

Changes in project direction, operational procedures, or individual resources do occur unexpectedly and with significant impact. Being adept at successfully facing change means having individuals and project teams committed to readiness. Readiness agility refers to having a defined readiness management process, doing proactive readiness management, and providing incentives that encourage individuals and project teams to gain the appropriate level of knowledge, skills, and abilities swiftly through training, mentoring, or hands-on learning to successfully meet their defined goals. Leaving out any of these aspects of the Readiness Management Discipline increases the likelihood of risks and failure. Without the agility achieved from having a readiness management process in place and quickly being able to obtain the appropriate skills necessary for success, organizations sometimes miss opportunities and find themselves behind their competition.

Invest in Quality

Obtaining the appropriate skills for a project team is an investment. Because they take time out of otherwise productive work hours, the funds for classroom training, courseware, mentors, or consulting can certainly be a significant monetary investment. However, investing time and resources to obtain or develop the right people with the right skills generally results in higher quality output and greater chances of success. Projects that fail do not supply a positive return on investment. Projects that succeed with low quality result in lowered satisfaction and adoption, which in turn might have significant cost impact in areas such as support. Up-front investment in staffing teams with the right skills generally leads to greater success and higher quality.

Learn from All Experiences

Capturing and sharing both technical and nontechnical best practices are fundamental to ongoing improvement and continuing success by ensuring the following:

• Allowing team members to benefit from the success and failure experiences of others

• Helping team members to repeat successes

• Institutionalizing learning through such techniques as checkpoint reviews

Checkpoint reviews help teams to make midcourse correction and avoid repeating mistakes. Additionally, capturing and sharing this learning creates best practices out of the experiences that went well.

Partner with Customers

Partnering with customers is a mutually beneficial means to improve team readiness and validate customer readiness to use a solution. It is great way to engage customers in their environment. A team should use this opportunity to better understand how customers use their current solutions and how they might use a solution being developed. While engaging customers, a team might use this opportunity to calibrate their assumptions about customer readiness. A team can also use this to informally validate alternative solution implementation approaches and options.

MSF Readiness Management Fundamentals

In this section, important concepts about readiness that are central to understanding the MSF Readiness Management Discipline are discussed.

Understand the Experience Within Each Team Member

Individual knowledge and experience are assets that offer dual value. The individual who possesses the knowledge and experience benefits personally, and the organization as a whole benefits when the individual applies knowledge and experience to projects. The value of this knowledge is diminished for both an individual and an organization without a collective understanding and measurement. For example, an individual might possess knowledge that an organization does not currently recognize, or an organization can lack a method to access that knowledge. Consequently, knowledge assessment and knowledge management are key concepts of a readiness effort. An organization should promote readiness through the capture and utilization of knowledge. A defined knowledge management program takes the idea from concept to reality. The benefit of a knowledge management program is its identification of knowledge lacking in both individuals and an organization.

Readiness Must Be Continuously Managed

Learning must be made an explicit and planned activityfor example, by dedicating time for it in the schedulebefore it will have the desired effect.

Carry Out Readiness Planning

As with any aspect of a project, planning for readiness is the key to success. Knowing up front the required level of readiness creates a proactive approach to assembling the appropriate resources, defining budgetary needs for training or obtaining the appropriate expertise, and building training time into the schedule. Readiness plans for each role are rolled up to create an overall readiness plan for a project team. Without planning, readiness management is likely to be overlooked until a significant gap in skills causes a project to be challenged, leading to significant risk of failure.

Measure and Track Skills and Goals

Successful readiness management includes assessing and tracking skills and the goals of individuals. This includes taking into account current abilities versus the desired knowledge levels so that the appropriate matching of skills can happen at both individual and project levels during resource allocation. Tracking and measuring the information help ensure project teams have the capability of doing readiness planning. Through the process of planning, project teams select members with both the desire to participate and skills required. The most effective way to accomplish this is by using a mandatory skills-reporting database and requiring all individuals to keep the data up to date.

Treat Readiness Gaps as Risks

After completing assessments and determining proficiency gapsessentially finding the current versus desired stateproject teams should identify readiness gaps as risks and treat them as such. Gaps in areas of key knowledge, such as the skills and abilities needed to complete a project successfully, can have profound effects on the schedule, budget, and resources needed to fill those gaps. Depending on the type of project, readiness risks can delay project initiation or indicate a need to obtain resources with the appropriate skills. When gaps are treated as risks, there is generally a more proactive approach to readiness management and subsequent mitigation of these risks.

Avoid Single Points of Failure in Skills Coverage

It is not good to have single points of failure, including team skills. Therefore, a team should have a primary and secondary for every skill set deemed important to the success of a project.

Readiness and the MSF Team and Governance Models

As the size and complexity of solutions tend to become greater, so does the importance of establishing and maintaining proactive readiness activities throughout a solution life cycle. Readiness goals should be expressed as activities and deliverables produced throughout a project life cycle intended to achieve those goals. Each advocacy group performs activities and produces deliverables that relate to project readiness goals for their constituency. When readiness is seen as a component of project goals, readiness deliverables are completed at various levels within each track and checkpoint of a project. Thus, mapping of readiness activities and deliverables to the MSF Governance Model tracks is useful, but teams will need to adjust their activities (and when these activities occur) according to the size and type of project.

The focus is on preparing a team with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to deliver a project effectively. In the early stages of the MSF Envision Track, this includes documenting a project approach to readiness. This approach documentation might contain information such as follows:

• The individuals that are to perform assessments, priorities, and budgets for training existing staff or obtaining the needed skills

• Determination of project scenarios and desired proficiency levels

• The ways in which these activities will be accomplished

During the MSF Plan Track, the high-level activities and deliverables identified during envisioning are taken to a greater level of detail, with estimates and dependencies applied for the tasks and integrated into the overall project plan and schedule. This helps determine the true cost and feasibility of a project beyond a development effort alone. This is the time when team assessment should be conducted to produce information on skills gaps so analysis and planning for bridging that gap move forward.

Because the needs of a team precede operational needs, many of the gaps identified for a team are filled during planning. This improves a design and determines readiness of a team for development.

Effectively prepared, Development and Test teams focus on project deliverables during a Build Track. Release/Operations, User Experience, and Product Management often begin to be involved in the early stages of preparation for final release. Incremental exposure of a solution to external constituencies and gradual involvement in later stages of testing enable a team to assess efficacy of organizational readiness activities of the eventual solution owners.

In the last stages of a project, most of the readiness activities have been or are being executed as the training and preparation of users and support and operations staff are done, and a solution is released and/or deployed.

At the end of a project, team effort relative to readiness is evaluated by a team and an organization so that subsequent projects are able to repeat successes and learn from areas that require improvement.

Deliberate outputs for readiness are often embedded in regular checkpoint deliverables but can be itemized separately to highlight or manage them with individual attention. If large readiness gaps exist, Program Management needs to make sure readiness activities and deliverables are not relegated to the background or assumed to occur indirectly. Readiness activities are people-centric, and therefore require constant vigilance.

MSF Readiness Management Process

Lead Advocacy Group: Program Management

The MSF Readiness Management Discipline includes a readiness management process to help prepare for the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to build and manage projects and solutions. It is considered a systematic, ongoing, iterative approach to readiness and is adaptable to both large and small projects. The MSF Readiness Management Process, graphically depicted in Figure 7-4, is composed of four steps:

• Define Identify and match up required team competencies and individual proficiency levels needed to plan, build, and manage a solution successfully.
  
  
• Assess Compare actual individual readiness with required readiness to identify readiness gaps.
  
  
• Change Take steps to improve readiness in an attempt to minimize readiness gaps.
  
  
• Evaluate Assess effectiveness of readiness improvement activities.
  
  

Figure 7-4. Steps of the MSF Readiness Management Process

The most basic approach is simply to assess skills and make appropriate changes through training and assessment. On projects that are small or have short time frames, this streamlined approach is quite effective. However, performing the steps of defining needed skills, evaluating the results of change, and keeping track of knowledge, skills, and abilities allows for the full realization of readiness management. It is also typically where organizations reap rewards from investments in readiness activities.

Step 1: Define

During envisioning, a team aligns its business and technology goals to create a shared vision of what a solution will look like. A team uses this to define environmental factors under which the team needs to perform (i.e., called scenarios). An example of a scenario is a high-risk infrastructure effort with tight deadlines. Using this information, a team defines a set of skills (i.e., competencies) needed in the various advocacy groups to achieve that vision successfully. The collective set of skills defined for each advocacy group can be further decomposed into required skill sets for each functional area. Scenarios are also used when assessing team member abilities (i.e., proficiencies). All of this is encompassed in the first step of the MSF Readiness Management Process called Define.

As just explained, the three components of defining readiness include the following:

• Scenarios

• Competencies

• Proficiencies

Outputs from this step include the following:

• Competencies identified with desired proficiency levels

• Competencies and proficiencies mapped to the appropriate scenario

Scenarios

Skill proficiency is greatly influenced by a solution delivery environment. A person with a given ability to perform a task will have varying degrees of success given different environmental factors. For example, some people are not fazed by a work environment with uncertainty and ever-changing requirements. Conversely, others lose productivity in this type of environment. Therefore, a person with an aversion to change put in a changing environment will not do as well as if that person were put in an environment with little change. This exemplifies how the same person with the same skills might exhibit different amounts of productivity because of environmental factors.

The description and classification of the different types of environments and situations in which teams operate within an organization are called scenarios. Scenarios generally fall into one of four categories as shown here and in Figure 7-5:

• High potential Planning and designing to deploy, upgrade, and/or implement a new solution, technology, or service in its organization. These are typically research type situations or situations in which an organization is reactively responding to competitor actions.

• Strategic Developing and exploiting new technologies, solutions, or services for strategic advantage or to capture a potential opportunity. These are typically market-leading solutions, which could lead to business transformation defining the next generation, long-term architecture.

• Key operational Deploying, upgrading, and/or implementing a new solution, technology, or service that has to coexist or continue to interact seamlessly with legacy software and systems. These are typically today's business-critical systems, aligned with the as-is technology architecture.

• Support Extending a solution to fit the needs of a customer's environment. These are typically valuable but not business-critical solutions, and they often involve legacy technology.

Figure 7-5. Typical scenario categories for solution delivery^[1]

^[1] John Ward and Joe Peppard, Strategic Planning for Information Systems, 3rd ed. (West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons, 2002), 41.

By categorizing projects within an organization into appropriate scenarios, readiness planning is done according to the unique nature of that project. Different scenarios require distinct approaches to obtaining the appropriate resources and skills for that project type. By first defining the scenario best classifying a project, the appropriate competencies and proficiencies can then be mapped.

Differing scenario types can also drive decisions for outsourcing or using consulting to obtain the skills needed. For example, staffing for a high-potential project scenario might include specialized vendor-trained consultants versus a project scenario where readiness planning typically includes courseware training and certification of in-house staff. Following are a few approaches to obtain the appropriate levels of readiness for each scenario in terms of knowledge, skills, and abilities.

• High potential Need to have a high degree of agility, be able to investigate and evaluate new technologies, and be prepared to obtain (for a short period) the best expertise available.

• Strategic Need in-house, in-depth expertise at a solution architect level and be able to bridge skills across technology to the business.

• Key operational Quality of technical knowledge and process are critical as is ready availability of the right skills. Typically, outsourcing occurs to obtain quality skills and knowledge or to develop strong in-house capabilities.

• Support The cost of delivery becomes paramount, and an organization might decide to rely on external skills (particularly for legacy) on a reactive basis.

With projects and their associated scenarios defined, it is then time to identify the competencies and subsequent proficiencies associated with these project scenarios.

Competencies

Competencies define a level of adeptness with which teams are able to perform given tasks given a particular scenario. Being adept means having the requisite knowledge and skills to perform the given role and associated tasks at an expected proficient level of performance (i.e., needed ability to perform a task). Competencies are commonly associated with task types or roles. A skills profile is associated with each task type or role such that an individual with the requisite skills should be able to perform. With roles, it is expected that competency in a few different areas is required. For example, on a particular project, the Infrastructure Architect role requires expertise in designing solutions that involve the Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange Server product lines.

Proficiencies

Proficiency is a measure of an individual's ability to execute tasks or demonstrate skill or capability within a given scenario. To make sure the difference between competencies and proficiencies is clear, consider that proficiencies are an assessment of a team member's abilities to perform in various capacities in various scenarios, whereas competencies define the abilities necessary to be able to perform a respective task type or role in a specific scenario.

The proficiency is designated by the level at which individuals are assessed or assess themselves. A proficiency level provides a benchmark, or starting point, for analyzing the gap between the individuals' current skills set and the necessary skills for completion of the tasks associated with the given scenario.

During the Define step of the MSF Readiness Management Process, the level at which individuals should be performing for each role in given scenarios is determined using either self-assessment or assessment testing. Individual proficiency levels are then associated with required project competencies so that when assessments are completed, the output is measured and analyzed to determine proficiency gaps. A proficiency gap is when performance is at a lower level than that of the expected proficiency level for a role or task type. Table 7-2 shows a sample proficiency rating scale used in proficiency assessments.

Table 7-2. Example of a Proficiency Rating Scale

Numerical Rating	Natural Language Rating	Description
0	No Experience	Not applicable.
1	Novice	Familiarity: Skill in formative stages, has limited knowledge. Not able to function independently in this area.
2	Intermediate	Working knowledge: Good understanding of skill area, and is able to apply it with reasonable effectiveness. Functions fairly independently in this area, but periodically seeks guidance from others.
3	Experienced	Strong working knowledge: Strong understanding of skill area, and is able to apply it very effectively in position. Seldom needs others' assistance in this area.
4	Expert	Expert: Has highly detailed, thorough understanding of this area, and is able to apply it with tremendous effectiveness in this position. Often sought out for advice when others are unable to solve a problem related to this skill area.

Step 2: Assess

The Assess step of the MSF Readiness Management Process measures individual proficiencies, and identifies and plans to mitigate readiness gaps. Two types of readiness gaps are assessed:

• Are the stated project needs, be it at a solution, team, subteam, or role level, actually what are needed?

• Are the teams, subteams, roles, and individuals able to deliver at their assessed skill level given their actual delivery environment?

By measuring these readiness gaps, learning plans are assembled to start to minimize these gaps.

Activities during this step include the following:

• Measure individual knowledge, skills, and abilities
  
  
• Revisit readiness needs
  
  
• Identify and analyze readiness gaps
  
  
• Create learning plans
  
  

Outputs from this step are as follows:

• Assessment output/gap analysis
  
  
• Learning plans
  
  

Measure Individual Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

Two options are available for performing individual assessments: self-assessment and standardized tests. Self-assessment is a procedure whereby individuals assess their own level of ability. This includes responding to a list of questions such as: "How well are you able to perform x?"

Self-assessment requires individuals to measure their own abilities using a scale such as that shown in Table 7-2. This technique is effective in learning how individuals perceive their own levels of ability. Although it might not always be an accurate assessment of the individual's abilities, it is a quick way to get some measurements. In addition, it helps later in forming personalized learning plans to know where individuals think they are with their abilities.

Standardized testing is the other method of assessing an individual's abilities. It enables calibration of an individual's skills as compared to a given baseline. This type of test requires individuals to respond to specific, often technical, questions to show their knowledge; to perform specific tasks; and to demonstrate analytical abilities.

Revisit Readiness Needs

Teams are assembled based on an estimated level of competency needed for the various roles. As teams gain experience with delivering, each team should revisit their readiness needs. In addition, readiness needs should be regularly revisited corresponding with changes in the business environment and changes in technology.

Although it is expected that project readiness needs will flux over the course of a solution delivery life cycle, if the variance is big enough, this should be treated as a readiness gap (if the need increases) or a potential staffing change (if the need decreases).

Identify and Analyze Readiness Gaps

A readiness gap is when an individual has demonstrated lower proficiency for a specific, required competency than the defined required level for his or her role (identified during the Define step). As mentioned previously, individual readiness gaps roll up through the various levels and can lead to a readiness gap at the enterprise level. Usually, this is not the case because part of the staffing process would make sure that selected team members complement each other's proficiencies and competencies so as to not have readiness gaps. However, in many cases when facing a new project, organizations do not have the internal capabilities or experience to assess correctly the skills and abilities needed. Providers such as Microsoft Certified Technical Education Centers (CTEC) or consulting organizations are able to assist with this essential step.

Create Learning Plans

Once readiness gaps at all levels have been analyzed, the information gathered is used to formulate learning plans. A learning plan consists of both formal and informal learning activities and guides individuals through the process of moving from one proficiency level to the next. A learning plan must go beyond traditional training delivery, such as instructor-led and self-study, and account for how to begin to apply the learned information to the job. This is usually reinforced with on-the-job mentoring or coaching. An effective learning plan takes into account the following:

• Different learning styles of individuals, and it accommodates those differences to efficiently use time and resources

• Appropriate resources such as training materials, courseware, white papers, computer-based training, mentoring, and on-the-job or self-directed training

It is critical that an organization and project team support its members as they execute their learning plans. Identifying a readiness gap is meaningless unless an organization is ready to mitigate it.

Step 3: Change

The Change step of the MSF Readiness Management Process implements the learning plans in an attempt to minimize readiness gaps and tracks progress to make sure the efforts are effective.

As just identified, activities during this step include the following:

• Implement learning plans
  
  
• Track progress
  
  

Outputs from this step include the following:

• Knowledge gained from training
  
  
• Progress tracking data
  
  

Implement Learning Plans

Activities and tasks outlined in an individual's learning plan should be incorporated into that person's respective project schedule. Otherwise, these activities and tasks are at great risk of being overwhelmed by the other planned activity.

Track Progress

It is important not just to facilitate learning but also to understand the effectiveness of the readiness efforts. Because learning is more involved and subjective than training is, it is challenging to track progress against the learning plans. The approach to track progress does not have to be complex. It might be as simple as having the individual report completed training.

Step 4: Evaluate

The Evaluate step of the MSF Readiness Management Process determines whether the learning plans were effective and whether lessons learned are being successfully implemented. During evaluation, a determination is made if the desired state, as described during the Define step and measured during the Assess step, was achieved during the Change step. In addition, a team should harvest lessons learned to help make the next project more successful.

This Evaluate step could be the end of the process. But because learning is an ongoing need for continued success, evaluation should be viewed as input to the next iterative cycle through the process.

Activities during this step include the following:

• Review results
  
  
• Manage knowledge
  
  

Outputs from this step include the following:

• Feedback
  
  
• Certifications
  
  
• Knowledge management system
  
  

Review Results

A real-world test of learning activities success is the effectiveness of the individual back on the job. A benefit of reviewing the results with each individual is the capability not only to guide individuals through their first exposure to new concepts, but also to enable the expert (mentor or coach) to assess training effectiveness. Using verbal and written feedback, the expert highlights the areas where individuals are performing well and are demonstrating understanding of the given concepts. Likewise, the mentor or coach is able to provide feedback on the areas where individuals are struggling or appear weak in their understanding and application of the new learning. This review helps to identify whether the knowledge transfer approach taken was the most effective and those areas that might need to be readdressed and where further training might be necessary. This also enables an organization, at any time in the life cycle, to analyze overall readiness to make necessary adjustments to readiness plans.

The individuals' activities in this step can include some introspection and self-assessment to determine whether the learning was effective before putting those new competencies to work. Individuals might also decide it is a good time to become certified because they have done the learning, performed the key tasks, and assimilated the knowledge.

Manage Knowledge

A natural side effect of training individuals is that the knowledge they acquire becomes intellectual capital that the individual is able to capture and disseminate throughout an organization. As learning plans are completed and applied on the job, individuals discover key learning that their training provided. Sharing this information with others throughout an organization enhances the collective knowledge and fosters a learning community. One objective of the Readiness Management Discipline is to encourage development of a knowledge management system to better enable the sharing and transfer of proven practices and lessons learned, as well as to create a skills baseline of the knowledge contained within an organization.

Individuals in an organization carry with them a body of learning, expertise, and knowledge that, however extensive or expansive, encompasses less than the collective knowledge of all the people. A knowledge management system provides an infrastructure by which that knowledge is harnessed and made available to a community.

As organizations face the need for global knowledge that needs to be easily and quickly used, compounded by shorter time frames for implementing solutions, requirements increase for individuals to share their knowledge and expertise and to reuse what others have learned.

Knowledge management systems provide many benefits, including, but not limited to, the following:

• Increasing organizational effectiveness by creating the ability for individuals to find the information and expertise they need, when they need it, fastregardless of its location.

• Establishing a common structure that facilitates the easy sharing of experiences and proven practices.

• Facilitating individuals working across organizational and geographical barriers through "global" communities. Because many customers have locations worldwide, there is an increased need for collaboration, sharing of proven practices, and lessons learned.

Adding Readiness Assessments to a Project Schedule

The MSF Readiness Management Process describes how to assess and improve team member readiness in context of the skills needed on a project. What is often less clear is how to use this information in assembling project schedules. One such way is to factor it into each team member's capacity to perform work. Microsoft Project provides a means to cap a team member's contribution to a project by using the "Max. Units" field on the Resource Sheet.

However, because it is expected that a team member's readiness gaps shrink as the project progresses, using this fixed value is not practical. As discussed later in task estimation, a benchmark set of skills should be used to estimate tasks (it is often helpful to have a particular person in mind as the benchmark). Then, all tasks should be estimated as if that benchmark person were to perform them. This simplifies the scheduling process (discussed in Chapter 8, "MSF Plan Track: Planning a Solution").

Once resources are applied to tasks, team members readiness to perform particular tasks can be factored in using the Units field of the assign resource as exemplified in Figure 7-6. In this example, a particular task called Task A has seven resources available to perform the task. With the first resource being the benchmark person (i.e., Cameron), the skills of the other resources are scaled accordingly as exemplified in the "Skill Normalization %." In this example, Kyle is estimated to be able to perform this task in 15 hours, whereas it would take Cameron 12 hours (hence a 75 percent normalization assessment). Many times, if Kyle was the selected resource, the project manager would change the work field to 15 hours upon assigning Kyle to the task. This is fine if resources do not change once assigned, but it makes it challenging when work assignments are fluidly changing. By adjusting the resource unit field (representing capacity), it preserves the benchmark estimate while appropriately stretching the duration. Another way to look at this is it will take Kyle 2 days to perform the same amount of work that it will take Cameron (the benchmark person) a day and a half to perform. The work estimate remains constant while the readiness of the person assigned affects the amount of time needed to perform the work (i.e., task duration).

Figure 7-6. Example of incorporating readiness into a project schedule

Another common reality is that not everyone on the team is assigned full time to the project. Even if they are assigned full time, they often have some implicit duties that reduce their capacity to perform. As such, availability of each resource can be represented as a percentage of time. For example, if a full-time commitment on a project is 40 hours a week, a resource that is available only 32 hours a week has an 80 percent availability. This too can be represented using "Max. Units," but often a resource's availability changes over the course of a projectespecially if it is a project that spans many months. Therefore, a "% availability" factor can be considered as a dynamic attribute of the resource. Combining a resource's percentage availability with that resource's skill normalization percentage gives his or her effective capacity to perform a given task. With both factors represented as a percentage, the resultant effective capacity is a multiplication of both as exemplified in Figure 7-7 (e.g., 75% x 80% = 60%).

Figure 7-7. Example of incorporating readiness and resource availability into a project schedule

Because this can be cumbersome to track and calculate for each task, it is more practical to assess a skill normalization and an availability percentage for each iteration. This is acceptable because a person's skill does not appreciably change over the course of an iterationespecially if it is a 30-day iteration. Also, most people can reasonably and confidently predict their availability looking forward a month at a time.

If this approach is adopted, team member readiness can easily be incorporated into the scheduling process. It also provides an easy means to adjust schedules based on team members improving their readiness as the project progresses.

Project Structure Document (Deliverable)

Lead Advocacy Group: Program Management

A project structure document is the culmination of many Envision Track activities. It reflects roles with needed skills and abilities as identified by readiness management efforts. It reflects feature and function teams needed to deliver a solution. It reflects stakeholder analysis, making sure the team model advocates for each key stakeholder. Overall, it defines the approach a team will take in organizing and managing a project team.