Relevance of use-cases in competency framework design

Competency framework as a tool for strategic alignment

Success of the organization strategy is dependent upon the talent pool and especially the leadership team demonstrating certain behaviors consistently. For example, when Louis Gerstner, Jr set out to turn around IBM, he identified a set of behavior changes which were critical for IBM’s success . One such behavior change was to move from “Product out – I tell you” attitude to “Customer in – in the shoes of the customer” way of working. Competency framework is one such tool to codify the desired behaviors for the success of the organization.

Need of lead indicators

What is a good competency framework? Understanding an answer to this question becomes important as organizations invest large sums of money into designing competency frameworks. At a broad level, apart from strategic alignment, attributes like usability, coverage (e.g. does it cover all roles?) and maintainability are used to judge the goodness of a competency framework. Let’s take “usability” attribute. One can always assess the usability of a framework post-facto. However, it is critical to identify lead indicators during the design phase which will give an idea of usability of the framework.

What is a use-case?

A use-case consists of a scenario where a stake-holder uses the system under design in a given context. For example, let’s consider a project ramp-up use-case. When a new project team is to be ramped up, the project manager has to evaluate various choices: How many senior team members do I need? What kind of competencies should they have? How many should we get from within the organization? How many do we have to hire from outside? Apart from project manager, there are various other people who are playing a role in this ramp-up, e.g. resourcing manager, recruitment consultants, sometimes senior management etc. A competency framework can be used as a reference and establishes a common language to communicate during this process. How various stake-holders will use the competency-framework in this situation will give rise to different use-cases.

Using use-cases as lead indicators

Identifying representative use-cases before the design goes a long way in making a competency framework robust. As the design is usually done phase-wise, coverage of the use-cases can be used as a measure of the completeness of the framework. Use cases can also assess modifiability of the framework. Every organization has a unique context and use-cases help in bringing out priorities to the situations where the competency framework is going to help most.