Challenges of finding the right skills in ICT
Probably no other department than the ICT department has to cope with such a fast evolution of skills.
Technical skills must be up to date in order to cope with the latest technologies used to implement new projects.
Functional skills are needed in order to be able to translate ever-changing agile business requirements into system specifications that technical people must understand and implement into a solution.
Project management skills are needed in order to cope with the ever-increasing complexity of large mission-critical projects and allow some agility while following a strict governance.
Finally, ‘hard’ skills (the content requirements of the job) need to be complemented with ‘soft’ skills (skills that refer to personal qualities like communication, sociability, self-management,…) in order to be really productive at the individual level.
Training and coaching of the internal staff is a constant challenge for the ICT manager.
On the other hand, some projects need some skills only for some time and it is therefore costly for organizations to train people only for a limited period of work.
Possible ways to address the skills shortage
A dynamic training and coaching policy is certainly important in order to keep skills up to date.
This strategy must be implemented together with professional development incentives that will motivate staff to upgrade their skills and keep up to date with changes in the ICT world.
Finally, most ICT organizations use the help of external contractors to ‘fill-the-gaps’ of internal skills.
With a little help from the market...
When an organization resolves to take help from outside in order to increase its ICT staff, it has basically three options: independent consultants, staffing firms and professional services firms.
Independent consultants (also known as ‘contractors’) work in their own right and will make a one-to-one contract with the organization. Although the right skills may be provided, if the number of people have to be staffed is important this will lead to huge overhead in contract negotiations and management on the ICT organization side.
Staffing firms will place resources on a temporary basis. These companies will target low prices, low overhead (and thus less internal cost).
Pure ‘body shoppers’ will mainly use independent contractors in order to keep their own human resources staff very low. They do not have the ‘skills update’ problem since this is left to the contractor. These companies also target long-term missions (several months or years).
The delivery will be mostly based on the number of days worked, not on the actual work delivered.
Professional Services companies will have internally their own workforce that will be sent as consultants to the ICT organizations. They will provide long-term but also shorter-term consultancy.
Professional Services companies often provide services not only based on the time (number of days) spent with the customer but also will provide services based on the deliverables, thereby taking some responsibilities in the work being done by the consultants.
SAGA Consulting unique proposition
At SAGA Consulting, we have observed the ICT service industry and found that most of the companies fit a single model. Since we believe that no model is perfect for the ICT organizations, we try to combine the best of both.
We have a large part of our work-force employed internally by which we have flexibility in service delivery that a pure ’body shopper’ does not have.
We have a ‘skill update’ strategy that includes trainings, coaching of less experienced, competence centers, partnerships with technology vendors, online library,...
We also provide ’managed services’ by which our customers pay for the work delivered and not for the time spent, this is also a main difference from ‘body shoppers’.
At the same time, we have setup an internal sales organization dedicated to professional services with very low overhead and very reactive response towards the requests of our customers.
Together with a dedicated account strategy in terms of sales, we can provide the best professional services at best time for a cost that cannot be matched by traditional professional services companies.