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Whitepaper on “Optimal Job Design”

through “Effective Utilization of Skills across

Employee levels”

- IMRAN AHAMED M

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Table of Contents

“AREA OF FOCUS” ............................................................................................................................................ 3

ORGANIZATION DESIGN AND STRUCTURE .......................................................................................................... 3

JOB DESIGN ......................................................................................................................................................... 3

“PROBLEM DEFINITION” .................................................................................................................................. 4

INFLUENCING FACTORS ............................................................................................................................................. 4

MAIN EFFECTS ........................................................................................................................................................ 4

ALTERNATE EFFECTS ................................................................................................................................................ 4

PROTOTYPING ........................................................................................................................................................ 5

ORGANIZATION’S OPERATIONAL SETUP ....................................................................................................................... 5

“RESEARCH DESIGN APPROACH”.......................................................................................................... 6

EXPLORATORY RESEARCH .................................................................................................................................. 6

DECISIONS FOR JOB DESIGN ................................................................................................................................ 7

RESEARCH DESIGN ............................................................................................................................................. 7

RESOURCE DATA ANALYSIS ....................................................................................................................................... 8

“THE RESULT – A FUNGIBLE JOB DESIGN” ......................................................................................... 9

PROPOSING A FUNGIBLE JOB DESIGN .................................................................................................................. 9

“THE IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGY”................................................................................................ 10

IMPLEMENTATION SEQUENCE ........................................................................................................................... 10

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“Area of Focus”

Organization Design and Structure

In an IT Services scenario the primary assets of an organization are the human resources. To translate

the use of these key assets into organizational performance, the organization should have the right

strategies for acquiring the right skills and utilizing them. This forms the main operational strategy of

any IT organization.

Defining the right skills is typically is achieved through the practice area “Competency Modelling”. A

competency model defines the underlying sets of skills, knowledge, personal characteristics and

abilities needed to perform in a role and help achieve the organization’s goals. Hence using Competency

Modelling as the basis and applying the principles of “Organization Design and Structure”, the

organizations can move towards implementing the right resourcing strategies.

Job Design

One of the core areas of Organization Design and Structure involves a scrutiny of the information on

how the resources are hired and utilized in terms of specializations. This is called “Job Design”, a

function of specifying the work activities of an individual or group in an organizational setting. The

objective of job design is to develop jobs that meet the requirements of the organization and its

technology and that satisfy the jobholder’s personal and individual requirements. The outcome thus

fits into any organization’s transformation process.

To analyze this we can take up any fast growing end-to-end IT Consulting, Services and Solutions firm

whose focus is on IT Services & Solutions, Consulting, Financial Services, Mobility, and other

enterprise verticals. Also if the organization could be in a transformation phase and the focus is on

strengthening current operations to complement new business development.

Through this whitepaper, I intend to propose an “Optimal Job Design”, to make these high-frequency

decisions measurably more reliable and valid.

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“Problem Definition”

On discussions with the Quality and Operations team of a leading Tier 2 IT Service organization and

some exploratory research, it was found that there was a dearth of an exclusive strategy for competency

planning and acquisition. Narrowing down further, it was found that there is a high demand for specific

skills and hiring specific skills had an adverse effect on the cost. It was roughly estimated that these

specific requirements were fulfilled through 80% by lateral hires and only 20% by internal training or

cross functional methodologies. This definitely had impacted the organizations’ ROI in a big manner.

Hence there was an opportunity to look at a much optimized model for acquiring and utilizing resources

across skills.

Problem Area (Resource Pool)

Influencing Factors

High Demand for specific or Niche skills ║High Cost of Lateral hiring ║

Non-optimized use of the skills acquired║ Inadequate cross function training

Main Effects

Decrease in ROI ║Diminishing Customer Satisfaction index ║ Absence of a

common pool just in time ║ Lack of preparedness

Alternate Effects

Increase in Attrition Rate ║ High rate of hiring rejections ║

Diminishing Brand Equity

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Prototyping With the background on the problem definition and the possible outcomes of employing “Job Design”,

the empirical study of the various parameters of the organization’s Employee Levels 5 (Managers), 6

(Leads) and 7 (Senior Engineers) resulted in producing an “Optimal Job Design” across these levels.

The resulting model would help the organization to look at attempting better ROI and better value.

Organization’s Operational Setup The organization functions in the “Horizontal” and the “Vertical” approach with the former, being the

cost centers, and the latter being the revenue centers. The Horizontal Units would be responsible for

Innovation and New Business Development and the Vertical Units responsible for delivery and project

execution. Towards this study, the area of study was focused upon one horizontal practice unit in the

organization. The key reasons for selecting this unit was because of the following characteristics

Required and had the highest number of diverse skills (Regular or Niche)

Highest rate of hiring – Focus only on immediate requirements, no prospective long term plans

High Hiring Cost since it’s mostly specific skill requirements and also with the high demand in the

market for highly skilled resources

Highest attrition rate – Resultant of not having a long term plan for the hired resources and

limitation only to the duration of the project

Low Customer Satisfaction Index – Resultant of not meeting high skill level and niche skill

requirements by the customer, average quality of resources hired

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“Research Design Approach”

Exploratory Research

With the help of information collected through discussions with key stake holders, as a first step a

SWOT analysis was done on the resourcing parameters for the unit

SWOT Analysis on the Unit

Further to the SWOT, the following was the thought process towards approaching a solution

Look for a high profit or a high value model

Look for Sustainable Development Practices

Understanding Team Dynamics - Highly Functional or Highly Technical

What should be average role ratio?

o Figure out the current staffing methodology from the data to propose a newer

methodology

Classify Skills into Clusters

Skill Balancing - How much specialized skills (say within Hadoop, levels of knowledge with a

technology)? How many team members should know the skill fully or how many should know

partially?

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Decisions for Job Design

Improving the performance of the organization is often as simple and as profound as best utilization of

the employees it controls and the results which are accountable. A unique job design strategy has to be

calibrated based on certain parameters. The approach towards an optimal job design was parameterized

on the following criteria observed in the data patterns

Job Design Parameters

Research Design

Further to the exploratory research, the resource and recruitment data was collected for the Unit. Typical

job descriptions for the skills were researched and collected from various job portals. This was followed

by a detailed skill clustering exercise. This was based on a high level product analysis of the various

tools used and accordingly the skill segregation matrix was derived for all the tools in practice by the

group, using a specific framework as a tool baseline.

This was followed by a skill segregation exercise based on job areas classification and tool

categorization. For this, interviews were done with employees of the organization and outside the

organization in various technical roles in the concerned skills taken for research.

This data was subject to various levels of analysis to arrive at the optimal model interpretations. These

models were used to determine the optimal job design.

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Approach towards “Optimal Job Design”

Resource Data Analysis As part of the Data Research (Quantitative and Qualitative), the secondary and primary data analysis

was carried out in the following sequence

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Data Analysis Sequence

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“The Result – A Fungible Job Design”

Proposing a Fungible Job Design

Fungibility is a critical concept for managing long-term costs and risk in IT. Fungibility describes things

that are capable of mutual substitution. Fungibility is important to IT management. Fungibility reduces

risk by giving us options if components fail. By letting us replace failing components, fungibility helps

the organization prolong the useful life of systems, which is important for better ROI. Typically people

cannot be treated as fungible but in an IT Services Scenario, the core assets are the knowledge, skills

aptitude and productivity of the employees. These, in a short term definitely cannot be interchangeable

but on a longer term can be looked into a fungible pattern. For Example, any project plan with an

unnamed "Senior Engineer" resource is treating the non-fungible in a fungible way.

The objective, in this empirical study, was to see how well we could arrive at an optimal job design

based on the study of the available utilization and allocation information. Towards optimal job design

the various interpretations (from Resource Analysis, Role Ratio Analysis, ROI Analysis, Value

Analysis) have led to proposing the idea of a “Fungible Job Design” for the skill modelling for the

Employee Levels 5, 6, 7 of the organization.

Optimal Job Design ~ Fungible Job Design

With concise analysis and tailoring, it could be proposed that the above model can be proposed across

any other unit in the organization.

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“The Implementation Strategy”

Implementation Sequence Till now, we have looked at the interpretations and have proposed a model that the organization can

implement across its various units. With the process to adopt the optimal job design across the various

units in the organization, it’s important to have certain tools to implement this at the “Organization”,

“Project Level” and “Employee” Levels to get this implemented. This section provides you with the

following tools for implementation of this job design strategy

Org Level Strategy Chart for Resourcing Decisions

Org Level Balanced Score Card

Project Level Decision Chart for Managers

Skill Update Process Implementation for Employees

Common Pool Hiring for “Generic” Skills (Will be an allied function to Job Design)

Cross Function Trainings for Specific Skills (Will be an allied function to Job Design)