Skills Analysis Star Chart

Every Intranet team I have worked in has been ridiculously under resourced. The business expects content to be maintained, development to take place, new sections to be created, content managers to be trained, new solutions to be explored and implemented and much, much more. In order to fulfill these expectations I have in the the past had to rely on the kindness of others to provide the specialist skills needed to carry out specific tasks. This is usually always done as a one off or favour because "that is not part of their PD" (man I wish I had a dollar for each time I have heard that one).

Recently, I was told I could enlist the assistance of some other people in my division (on a casual basis of course) to help with "The Intranet". The skills these people had varied greatly so I needed to choose people who had particular skills that I needed. Enter the "Skills Analysis Star Chart".

I came across this visualisation concept a few years ago thanks to Dr Jianzhonh Lu, a fellow member of the Intranet Leadership Forum. It is simply a way to plot the skills already present in your team and to graphically identify areas where you could use help. By quickly rating some of the key skills on this speadsheet, I can produce a graphical representation of skills that can be shown to managers, included in submissions or simply used to decide yourself what type of people to recruit.

The tool linked below is a simple speadsheet. It can be easily modified to add more or reduce the number of skills shown. If you need help formatting this tool, contact me via the email link included in my profile (click my picture).