Rebuilding Core Competencies When a Company Splits 57Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without writtena representative group of employees to each session. Representative employees
were defined as experts or those who are more than adequate at performing their
job.
Using the GroupSystems tools, participants developed a list of core skills and
abilities needed to perform their jobs. The list was then prioritized by importance and then
each skill was rated by accessibility in the new organization. The idea was that after the
two ratings, the most important items that were the least accessible appeared at the top
of the list. Participants then commented on the items in the prioritized list by identifying
how best to address the gap in skill and/or ability. The same process was used to develop
a commented prioritized list of knowledge and/or information items. These procedures
were repeated for each of the four job families. At the end of each four-hour session, the
details of each session were recorded using the computer-assisted tools in GroupSystems.
Microsoft Word files of all the items, ratings, and comments were compiled, compared,
and then consolidated in an Access database.
Due to time constraints and competing projects, however, the groups were smaller
than desired and not every functional area was represented. For example, for the systems
development group people from accounts receivable were not represented in the focus
group. Other problems with the focus group approach included a bias toward the
Americas since these groups were done in Colorado, and a small number of people from
each company. In one group all but one representative was from Agilent, so there was
only one representative for all of HP, which naturally made the results biased.
Nonetheless, 231 unique core competency skills were identified during the focus
group sessions that were then used as the basis for questionnaires for each job family.
Skills, abilities, and knowledge were all grouped into one list since the distinction is
purely academic for the study’s purpose; however surveys contained items that were
most related to each job family. On each survey, an employee was asked to rate the
criticality of each skill where critical is defined as a skill that is important and is also in
short supply within the new organization.
At the time the questionnaires were developed, it was believed that two rating
scales were needed, one for importance and one for availability or accessibility (similar
to those used in the focus group sessions). The survey instruments were very long,
however, because some of the skills lists had over 100 items on them. By having
employees rate each item on two scales, it was believed that the response rate would be
too low to be useful, so accuracy was sacrificed for expediency. (Competing projects
such as Y2K, the split of the company’s systems, and year-end close still limited the time
of employees.) As added incentive to complete the survey, employees were given a free
lunch chit for a completed survey. In addition to the rating of the items developed from
the focus groups, respondents were asked to add missing items to the list and identify
those items for which they considered themselves an expert. By cross-referencing the
self-reported experts with the identified experts in the focus groups, we had a more
validated list of experts than we had by using only self-reported experts.
Data were tracked and recorded by respondent so that experts can be readily
identified. The Access database was updated by entering data from each completed
questionnaire. Appendix A contains the database tables that were used to capture and
analyze the data.