Companies need to move faster to keep up with automation and the ongoing redefinition of their product and service offering. To do this means knowing which skill you have in-house and the skills that you have at your disposal through your resource networks. Product development will need to go hand-in-hand with human resource skill requirements. Optimising resource efficiency means deploying the right skills at the right level in the right place and at the right time. Skill assessment and strategic skill planning will become a critical part of any business and should be seen as an integral part of project management.

From both a strategic as an operational perspective, being able to identify teams as critical skill sets offers a better understanding of risks and areas of improvement. Identifying the breadth and depth of skill portfolios can:

• Create visibility of the skills that are currently available in-house
• Determine if there are geographically distributed clusters of key skills (leading to recognition of centres of excellence)
• Determine if there are skills missing or under/over-represented in the current resource pool
• Define skills that will become less used/redundant or more needed/essential
• Create an agile project team configuration process

Identifying different types of vulnerabilities enables a more sophisticated form of risk management at skill level and gives a better usage of the skills available – "doing more with less".

Exospect has over 15 years of experience supporting companies in Strategic Skill Resource Management with considerable success. After a global sales team underwent an Exospect evaluation and realignment programme, the client saw its sales increase by $600M (cumulative) in under three years.