Last Thursday on my new team, Tom organized an interesting exercise to map our team skills.
I never did it before. I was a bit intimidated at first but turned out to be an interesting and a useful exercise.
We started to collaboratively generate a lot of skills that we have and/or we need to be successful on our projects. After that, we grouped the skills in clusters and then each of us rated against the cluster. Example of clusters were “Web Technologies”, “Customer Relationships”, “Automated Testing” and so on. We rated ourselves on a scale from 1 to 5 and also expressed an interest level (Low, Medium or High). Finally, for each cluster we calculated our average skill level and interest and plotted on a graph. The graph is the final outcome that represent the current level of skills and interests in the team.
We completed the exercise discussing the results considering an additional variable that is how important the set of skills is for the project and what are the area that we need to develop more. Interestingly, together we pretty much covered what we need for our projects and pair programming will help to spread the knowledge and competence across the team.
The final graph is now visible on our whiteboard.