At ThoughtWorks, we have an old and boring skills and certification tracking system which managers use to find the right people for projects. The list of skills and skill categories are static. And any additions, modifications, or deletions to the list of skills or categories must be handled by an administrator. (Linking people to skills, of course, is the responsibility of each consultant.) This type of system is really lame to use and manage, and it doesn’t really scale. (More people == more skills == more maintenance for the data admins). Here are some thoughts on what a new skills tracking system could look like:

Taking a hint from del.icio.us and flikr, I would suggest letting people “tag” themselves in a simple system with little forced structure.

For example, I would “tag” myself with stuff I think I’m skilled in: python, plone, django, peoplesoft, oracle, selenium, javascript

[Whether I'm still "skilled" in PeopleSoft and Oracle is debatable, now that we've hired, Phil, a real Oracle-certified DBA. :-) ]

And for Resource Management to recognize me as a “python expert”, let other ThoughtWorkers do the rankings by creating links to other ThoughtWorkers. The more inbound links someone has, the more “guru” someone is. Isn’t this how Google calculates its top rankings?

Going further, for each tag linked to my name, I have a short list in my mind of the other ThoughtWorkers who I would contact regarding django, or python, or selenium stuff. Another example for this is: “Who would you include in the ‘to’ field in an email regarding Oracle?” — Promod and Phil would be my choices. For Python, it’s Paul, Sam, Subha, and Julian. For Ruby, I’d go to Dave, Obie, Jon, Joe, Aslak, or Martin for help. Maybe I want to write a book on Selenium? There’s another list for that– with Martin, of course, being the patron saint of aspiring technology book writers. ;-) For graphic site design advice, I’d email Anne. In the world of QA/testing, I’d go find Marc or Chris. For business innovation ideas (like furthering Selenium development), I’d talk to Paul and Rebecca. And on and on goes my list. Creating a lightweight “system” that captures this knowledge would be better than our current “enterprise” system, I believe.

Something like this might not even need to be “built”. The knee-jerk reaction by someone excited by this idea would say “Rails!” or “Django!” for the solution. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there was already a Rails scaffold generator for a complete end-to-end skills tracking system. ;-) But that might be over-designing the solution.

You could just encourage people to edit their profiles in the in-house wiki with their “tags”. And encourage a work ethic of keeping individual “Who would I contact for…” lists up-to-date there as well. RM could “mine” this data as needed. Getting people motivated to update the links is probably no harder or easier than getting them to do it in the old system.

Maybe I’ll start it off and call it “Jason’s List” :-)

Update: I should rather call it “Obie’s List”. He made a similar, but farther reaching, internal proposal for a tagging-based RM system almost exactly a year ago. I even spoke briefly about it with him last year. So inventor credits go to Obie (and del.icio.us and flickr) :-) My “riff” on his original idea is to make the concept more simple, to the point that no new software needs to be written and can use current infrastructure (like our wiki or even our public profiles).