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Success Stories

Better Project Teams

Building Project Teams with Competency Management
This engineering contractor found that with competency management, improving project team success rates could be done more effectively by supplying their project management system with better information about the skills of their talent pool. The client found that competency management was integral to project team optimization.

Business Overview
The client, a large engineering contractor, based the majority of its business on government contracts handled by project teams. Managing a portfolio of projects required continuous balancing of human resources across all projects. High success rates were an inherent part of the client’s business and so a significant focus was put on maintaining high quality project teams. The client used Microsoft Project to plan, schedule and track projects, but lacked the competency components necessary to optimize the system.

Challenge
As projects progressed, the client continually identified conflicting demands on resources and was in need of a method to balance human resources and find available project team candidates.  The client expected several issues to be fixed by a single solution. First, the client’s needed an organized manner in which to find the right talent at the right time. The client had developed and contracted with an extensive pool of resources, however there was no system in place for the client to find out the competencies and areas of expertise of each possible project candidate. Second, the client desired a solution that would improve workforce management without impacting its current projects. Third, the client wanted a repeatable system that would allow for continuous improvements into the future.

Solution
The client licensed the competency management solution and with the help of Hal Gerrish, Avilar’s Director of Competency Management, applied competency models considered to be strategic to the project portfolio. Assessments were distributed virtually and collected from all of the client’s employees regardless of assignment location. With the data compiled from the workforce assessments, a competency database was created that included all of the client’s employees and contractors. The client was able to utilize the extensive competency database to locate qualified candidates for projects that were aligned with the employees’ skills and fit their schedule.  Additionally, the client used a built-in “Team Builder” feature of the competency system in the early stages of the project to support project risk assessment as well as support candidate identification.  Team Builder was used to locate candidates and data was provided in a file format (MPX) for import by Microsoft Project.  In this manner, qualified resources populated the existing Microsoft Project system.  The client was able to create teams based on the necessary competency sets, assess project team risk, and identify resource gaps and link the data to MS Project for tracking.

Results
With the new method for assessing project team competencies and an analytical method for measuring success rates, the client improved critical business processes. New employees were quickly and seamlessly integrated into the new corporate structure where they could begin contributing to the company. The client had an organized method for creating project teams but did not have to go through extensive changes to existing practices, such as using Microsoft Project. The client walked away with an organized database of its employee competencies, improved project success rates, integration with existing business practices including Microsoft Project, and most importantly; the ability to easily repeat this process.

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