Ittalentinsight

IT professionals have a strong sense and sensitivity, only insightful management with solid judgment can manage talent skillfully.

Due to the dynamic and volatility of the economy, changing nature of technology, overwhelming growth of information, the IT skills gap is not a fiction, but a reality. IT needs to discover the alternative talent pipeline and build a strong pool of talent. 

Nowadays talented people flow around more frequently and their knowledge, skills need to be kept updated for building professional competency. There’s no doubt, organizations need to treat their people as human capital to invest in, only insightful management with solid judgment can manage talent skillfully, harness innovation and lead transformative change smoothly. .

The real challenge is to build and retain a strong team with talented people when you don't have all the resources available at your disposal: Strategy management, talent management, resource management go hand in hand. One of the management pitfalls is that the organization underestimates the resources necessary to successfully complete each business initiative to reach strategic business goals. If you happen to be in a high growth situation with the business, you have the natural feel good of being part of a dynamic, winning team and then all of these things are easier, people are more engaged in getting the work done to accelerate performance.

IT management is starved for resources.. An effective resource allocation scenario helps to get all related people involved, take advantage of resources effectively, optimize cost, set priorities, align strategic goals of the company with talent, resource scientifically, not only for achieving the business goals, but also for growing people, so keep business processes transparent in order to build a highly intelligent organization. Make a seamless transformation from managing people as the human cost to treating humans as resources to investing in people as the capital.

Talent strategy as an integral component of corporate strategy does not show up on the bottom line or immediately drives top line growth: There's a correlation between talent management and project management. People are usually the weakest link to build a high performance organization. There are gaps in understanding short term quick fix and strategy for mid to long term business growth. IT needs to understand the business issues so they implement the business rules accurately. It’s important to define the updated competency model, assess the talent's overall capability to solve problems, Thus, talent managers should ponder: When do you need specialized generalists, where should you put generalized specialists? Shall you promote internal candidates for smooth transaction or hunt from external outliers for innovation and transformation. Etc.

Both team building and growth are art and science. It’s critical to strike the right balance of learning capability, character, skills, communication and energy within the teams. There are varying contributing factors to project overwhelming and lack of priority. People suffer from fatigue. IT skills are complex, long term business initiative management perhaps provides a certain level of work security, but long-term projects are the ones where a developer will not be able to organically grow his\hers skills after reaching a certain level of expertise. The technological basis of a long-term project does not require constant and frequent updates which lead to stagnation, talent can't grow inside such projects. Thus, staffs and management need to work interactively for developing talent effectively.

The challenge for IT management is how to build and retain a great team when you don't have the easy carrots to give out: Talent strategy is a significant component in IT strategy while IT strategy is an integral part of business strategy. Building high-performance teams is at the heart of what a talent manager should do and choosing the right balance of team members with unique skills is critical to drive high performance. The talent management needs to ponder talent retention dilemmas: Shall you invest in your people? What happens if you invest in developing and training the people and then they leave? What happens if you don’t invest and they stay? Etc.

Some fresh mindset, new skills, or integral digital capabilities are needed every day because we live in a time of rapidly changing digital dynamic. Interesting new projects using the latest technologies complete with advanced training will serve to attract and retain the best and brightest. But it’s not always a practical solution as most IT organizations that get stuck at the low level of organizational maturity spend most of their resources on operations, support, and maintenance activities. Getting the balance right is a must as the consequences can be difficult and expensive. The overall effect you try to achieve is an IT employee that strongly identifies with the team, the work, and the business. Once that's there, recruiting and retention gets a lot easier.

The IT knowledge life cycle has been shortened due to the changing nature of technology, thus, when assessing talent, more dynamic and balanced approaches are needed. Due to the changing nature of technology, IT needs to discover the alternative talent pipeline and build a strong pool of talent. Top IT performers are more adaptive and learning agile, high quality IT professionals need to be life-learners and change agents. Forward-looking organizations should experiment, develop and mature data-driven talent management for leaping through digital transformation.

Posted in: IT Innovation,Talent Master