A Model for Assessing the Maturity of Technical Ladders

Need for a tech-ladder maturity assessment model

Most of the technology organizations define dual-ladders: a managerial ladder and a technical ladder. They also have an associated competency framework that helps the organizations define entry criteria for each level of the ladder and is used in hiring, promotions reviews and in career pathing of employees.

Between the two ladders, assessment of the managerial ladder is relatively better understood. After all, the metric associated with managerial ladder is indeed tracked by investors and customers. How much revenue did you lose due to delivery slippage? How come there is so much difference between the profitability of BU1 and BU2? How much revenue did you close against the plan last quarter? How much is your attrition vis-à-vis competition? We hear these questions in internal management meetings as well as in analyst calls. We don’t need to look anywhere else for judging how our management is performing. However, nobody asks what kind of patents did you file last quarter?[1] Or how many new ideas did you implement last year? And you can’t blame analysts for that. Unless your revenue from patents is 50% of your total revenue (like that of Qualcomm which had a revenue of $683 million a quarter from QTL division Q-Jun-2006 which is 57% of Qualcomm’s total revenue), you don’t have an easy way to measure how well your technical ladder is working.

However, technical ladder exists for a reason (if it exists). It is expected to make significant contribution in building a technology brand, it is expected to give competitive advantage to the organization, and it is expected to nurture the aspirations of the young and bright talent the company is attracting. Hence, it is imperative that organizations start thinking about a model to assess the maturity of the technical ladder and it should have a feedback loop like in CMM so that system can improve itself.

Key parameters of the assessment model

How do we assess the maturity of a tech-ladder? Well, that depends upon what it is expected to achieve. Not every technology organization with a tech-ladder is focusing on its patent portfolio. Or for that matter, expecting quality patents from an organization where good white papers don’t come out, is like expecting “Defect Prevention” activity to mature before “Risk Management” is matured in the CMM framework.

I believe that following parameters should be considered while assessing the maturity of tech-ladders:

1. Strategy alignment: How much of the tech-ladder output is in line with today’s and tomorrow’s business?

2. Productivity: How many papers are we publishing in conferences? How many patents are we filing? Are we helping the business acquisition folks enough to explain or demonstrate our technology / offering?

3. Career pathing: Do employees believe in tech-ladder? Is tech-ladder motivating young and bright engineers plan their careers? Is it creating role models?  Are some of the senior folks in the tech-ladder creating a brand outside the organization (like do we have an embedded-guru or a database-guru or Linux-guru etc.)

A sample model

Following table shows how we can use the parameters mentioned above to build a model. I am sure this can be refined further. However, this shows an approach how we can build one.